Bitcoin - Part 2

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I have seen what happens before when uncritical thinkers read each others' posts. They reinforce their POV to such an extent that they become impervious to all forms of logic.

They end up like this:
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Tippit said:
What you think is "weird" is subjective, and irrelevant. Bitcoin certainly is volatile.
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It is irrelevant if it is merely my personal opinion. Not if it is one shared by potential users. My suspicion is that the weirdness factor is widely shared.


Tippit said:
Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value, just like all central bank sponsored fiat currencies happen to have. The extrinsic value of bitcoin is that people who are willing to accept its market risk and volatility can move large values of wealth around or overseas evading thieves and tyrannical government employees (like US customs, for instance).

Does anyone actually read this thread?
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It's not always easy reading the thread when my eyes roll back after reading "fiat" and "tyrannical government".

But I would be interested to know what you mean by "large amounts of wealth". If we assume that Bitcoins themselves are volatile, then the people moving this "large amount of wealth" run the risk of losing far more just from holding on to something that could disintegrate at any minute rather than lose a small percentage due to the fluctuation of normal currencies.

Let's say that I have ten Bitcoins. What kind of "wealth" do I possess?
 
Tippit said:
What you think is "weird" is subjective, and irrelevant. Bitcoin certainly is volatile.



Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value, just like all central bank sponsored fiat currencies happen to have. The extrinsic value of bitcoin is that people who are willing to accept its market risk and volatility can move large values of wealth around or overseas evading thieves and tyrannical government employees (like US customs, for instance).

Does anyone actually read this thread?
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Yes but that doesn't mean we hasten to express our support for your extremist views about Jewish finance conspiracies. or about how all legality is guvmint tyranny, so only despots charge customs duties, and its our right to evade them.
 
Tippit said:
You express an unusual amount of concern for the well being of the investment portfolios of strangers on the internet. I do not believe that this concern is real.
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If you have now read #1341 I'm sure you will join me in feeling concern for the future financial wellbeing of psion10 and like-minded persons. I really do hope they keep well clear of the jaws of the sharks.
 
Tippit said:
What you think is "weird" is subjective, and irrelevant. Bitcoin certainly is volatile.



Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value, just like all central bank sponsored fiat currencies happen to have. The extrinsic value of bitcoin is that people who are willing to accept its market risk and volatility can move large values of wealth around or overseas evading thieves and tyrannical government employees (like US customs, for instance).

Does anyone actually read this thread?
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Existing currencies are asset-backed. The Fed has sellable assets, the government has sellable assets to infuse liquidity to the Treasury. If the government or Fed tightened up too much, they can react. If they failed, civil claims over assets could be heard (in theory, since nobody would care much about a long court case amidst the famine and whatnot).

If Bitcoin flops, is there an entity to sue? Is there even an entity that has jurisdiction to hear the case?

This is where the tapatalk signature that annoys people used to be
 
Craig B said:
If you have now read #1341 I'm sure you will join me in feeling concern for the future financial wellbeing of psion10 and like-minded persons. I really do hope they keep well clear of the jaws of the sharks.
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You don't care about whether psion or anyone else loses money. Furthermore, your baseless opinion as expressed ad nauseam could be harmful if you manage to persuade someone out of investing in bitcoin and it turns out to continue its historic run. The best thing investors can do is to mostly ignore forums like this, and do their own due diligence.
 
Craig B said:
Yes but that doesn't mean we hasten to express our support for your extremist views about Jewish finance conspiracies. or about how all legality is guvmint tyranny, so only despots charge customs duties, and its our right to evade them.
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I don't believe in any jewish finance conspiracies. That's another of your failed attempts to accuse me of being an anti-semite. I believe that the NWO conspiracy is real, and there are some specific families involved who i've mentioned by name, and for whom there is a lot of historical evidence that they've been involved. As to whether the US government or US customs is or has been tyrannical, I'm sure you are uninterested, that is meant for others to decide.
 
Delphic Oracle said:
Existing currencies are asset-backed. The Fed has sellable assets, the government has sellable assets to infuse liquidity to the Treasury. If the government or Fed tightened up too much, they can react. If they failed, civil claims over assets could be heard (in theory, since nobody would care much about a long court case amidst the famine and whatnot).

If Bitcoin flops, is there an entity to sue? Is there even an entity that has jurisdiction to hear the case?

This is where the tapatalk signature that annoys people used to be
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Existing currencies are backed by nothing but fraud and violence. The assets that the Fed has acquired were purchased via fraud, and the sellers were typically rewarded with 100 cents on the dollar where the assets were worth a fraction of that.

The decentralized nature of bitcoin is a feature, not a bug, to people interested in it. Obviously you are not one of those people.
 
Tippit said:
You don't care about whether psion or anyone else loses money. Furthermore, your baseless opinion as expressed ad nauseam could be harmful if you manage to persuade someone out of investing in bitcoin and it turns out to continue its historic run. The best thing investors can do is to mostly ignore forums like this, and do their own due diligence.
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Well I hope you are suitably diligent. Is this not interesting? If I persuade someone out of investing in Bitcoin and it continues its "historic run," then that person will lose by attending to my advice. But if it collapses, then I will have done a favour to anyone who heeds me. That's because Bitcoin has no value except its future price, which is unknowable, as I have argued.

You can't say to me: if you persuade someone out of investing in Bitcoin they will lose the chance of acquiring an intrinsically valuable asset, like a bond that pays interest, or equity in an enterprise that pays regular dividends.

You can't say that, because Bitcoin has no intrinsic value at all. You don't even claim it has. Its attractiveness is how it "runs". Pure speculation. A transparent bubble. A zero sum game of dice throwing.

My advice? Stay out of the casino.

ETA Bitcoin trading price range today $12,166 to $14,112.
 
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Craig B said:
If you have now read #1341 I'm sure you will join me in feeling concern for the future financial wellbeing of psion10 and like-minded persons. I really do hope they keep well clear of the jaws of the sharks.
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I suppose I should address this fake concern of yours.

I can assure you that I have not gambled with any money that I can't afford to lose (the first rule of gambling). Even if your worst case scenario happened and bitcoin crashed permanently I will be all right. I am happy to hold on to whatever I have for the long haul just for the fun of it. I have been studying the bitcoin price charts since 2011 and I am fully aware of the short term and long term risks of investing in bitcoin and I know how to avoid getting myself into trouble.

So you can now rejoice in my "future financial wellbeing".

Actually I am more interested in my XRP holdings. XRP is the fuel for the Ripple network. Since Ripple is tailor made for transferring sums of money around the world and includes automatic currency conversions along the way (actually it transfers IOUs) many big name banks are using it. This gives XRP a little more legitimacy than some of the other crypto currencies around. (Infrequent users pay a fraction of XRP per transaction - frequent users pay much more. This is Ripple's method of preventing DDOS attacks).

I acquired some XRP a few years ago but nearly forgot about it because XRP was never worth more than a fraction of a cent. However, since the beginning of 2017, its value has soared as it tracks other crypto currencies and is currently trading at around $2.

I could be on my way to another paper fortune. If not, c'est la vie.
 
psionl0 said:
This trick has been attempted many times through the years. Find a bad word, call bitcoin that bad word and use any similarities - no matter how slight nor how many other forms of investment/speculation share those similarities - and say, Q.E.D.

...
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A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man".

The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up a straw man") and the subsequent refutation of that false argument ("knock down a straw man") instead of the opponent's proposition.

This technique has been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly in arguments about highly charged emotional issues where a fiery "battle" and the defeat of an "enemy" may be more valued than critical thinking or an understanding of both sides of the issue.

(This public service announcement has been brought to you by Wikipedia.)

psionl0 said:
(meltdown with sheep)
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Wow.
 
In response to Tippit's posts about fiat money I began reading about Money, Commodity Money and Fiat Money in Wikipedia. Then on to South Sea Bubble and Tulip Mania. And finally the Greater Fool theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

The greater fool theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price. In other words, one may pay a price that seems "foolishly" high because one may rationally have the expectation that the item can be resold to a "greater fool" later.
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psionl0 said:
I suppose I should address this fake concern of yours.

I can assure you that I have not gambled with any money that I can't afford to lose (the first rule of gambling). Even if your worst case scenario happened and bitcoin crashed permanently I will be all right. I am happy to hold on to whatever I have for the long haul just for the fun of it. I have been studying the bitcoin price charts since 2011 and I am fully aware of the short term and long term risks of investing in bitcoin and I know how to avoid getting myself into trouble.

So you can now rejoice in my "future financial wellbeing"
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That's fine. One reads about people who are so confident that they invest more than they can really afford, and borrow money or use credit cards to fund their speculation. I think such people will be in trouble when the inevitable bursting of the bubble occurs.
... I acquired some XRP a few years ago but nearly forgot about it because XRP was never worth more than a fraction of a cent. However, since the beginning of 2017, its value has soared as it tracks other crypto currencies and is currently trading at around $2.

I could be on my way to another paper fortune. If not, c'est la vie.
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A crypto that jumps from a fraction of a cent to around $2 because it is tracking other cryptos looks like a very speculative object to me, and C'est la vie is a good approach to it.
 
psionl0 said:
This trick has been attempted many times through the years. Find a bad word, call bitcoin that bad word...

In this case the bad word is "ponzi scheme"
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Ponzi schemes aren't any worse than all those other ways of making 'free money'. I actually think they are good because they separate fools from wealth that they don't deserve.

Of course, you have to re-work the definition of a ponzi scheme to make it seem reasonable... The key feature of ponzi schemes and other related schemes is FRAUD. That is why bitcoin doesn't fit the description.
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We don't know that Bitcoin isn't a fraud. But even if its mythical inventor never intended to create a Ponzi scheme, it still shows all the characteristics of one.

Bitcoin's Mysterious Creator Appears to be Sitting On a $5.8 Billion Fortune
In 2013, Bitcoin watcher and head of cryptocurrency firm rsk.co Sergio Lerner wrote a series of blog posts explaining why he believes an account holding 980,000 individual Bitcoins belongs to Bitcoin’s mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Lerner analyzed the path of the first Bitcoins ever created, or “mined,” and traced them to a single mining source. Lerner then correlated this source to about 19,600 other Bitcoin “blocks,” which were actually just sets of cryptographic puzzles that, when solved, were worth 50 Bitcoins in 2010.

This mining entity stopped at 19,600, and never moved any of the Bitcoins it had earned.
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If Lerner is right then the entity calling himself 'Satoshi Nakamoto' never intended to use Bitcoin as a currency, but just sat on his stash waiting for the price to go up - which he knew would happen because that's what it was designed to do! Meanwhile millions of libertarians are still being sucked in by this Ponzi scheme that masquerades as a better alternative to 'fiat' currency.

And that's not bad either. Watching libertarians get sucked in is actually quite entertaining!
 
Craig B said:
Yes but that doesn't mean we hasten to express our support for your extremist views about Jewish finance conspiracies. or about how all legality is guvmint tyranny, so only despots charge customs duties, and its our right to evade them.
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woo, address the argument and not the arguer seems to be the thing to be said here.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
If Lerner is right then the entity calling himself 'Satoshi Nakamoto' never intended to use Bitcoin as a currency, but just sat on his stash waiting for the price to go up - which he knew would happen because that's what it was designed to do!
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Wow. Satoshi Nakamoto is not only a computer geek but psychic and can control the future too!
 
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Roger Ramjets said:
Ponzi schemes aren't any worse than all those other ways of making 'free money'. I actually think they are good because they separate fools from wealth that they don't deserve.

We don't know that Bitcoin isn't a fraud. But even if its mythical inventor never intended to create a Ponzi scheme, it still shows all the characteristics of one.

Bitcoin's Mysterious Creator Appears to be Sitting On a $5.8 Billion FortuneIf Lerner is right then the entity calling himself 'Satoshi Nakamoto' never intended to use Bitcoin as a currency, but just sat on his stash waiting for the price to go up - which he knew would happen because that's what it was designed to do! Meanwhile millions of libertarians are still being sucked in by this Ponzi scheme that masquerades as a better alternative to 'fiat' currency.

And that's not bad either. Watching libertarians get sucked in is actually quite entertaining!
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One should be able to analyze the block chain to see if those first bitcoins are being sold. And when and how fast. What he should do is sell at a rate that will not kill the market.

As for being a psychic he just relies on human nature - there are many who are angry at government corruption and incompetence, and their manipulation by the rich.

One does not have to be a fool to be parted from one's money. Just prudently invest in a unit trust, and then let rich bankers use high frequency trading to skim billions off what should be normal proper investing - while the government sits by and does not ban the irregular trading.
 
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