Can confirm bitcoin uses a lot of energy, I have been reading bitcoin tweets all day and I'm exhausted

The fanbase is like a bunch of degenerate gamblers.

@N00bPancakes I believe it's just a bubble

Hehe I just parsed a nonce all the way from Denmark and boy are my fingers.l broken hehehe

This is a train wreck.

Wrong category.
Wrong weekly group rant.
Equating investing with gambling.
“Crypto is a bubble”

All wrong.

(Though to be fair, most crypto traders don’t have a bloody clue.)

@Root How is investing in stocks/crypto different from gambling ? Note: I am not being aggressive. Just curious.

@purist
When you gamble, you’re making a bet something will happen. If it does, you win money. So far so good. However, if it doesn’t happen, you lose your entire bet.

In crypto, stocks, forex, etc., if you make a bet that the value will increase, and it instead decreases, you don’t lose everything. You’re buying something that’s worth X amount. If it drops 5%, you now have something worth 95% as much as you bought it for. Not gambling.

You could margin/leverage trade, which is trading with someone else’s money, but this isn’t gambling either, though it is riskier. (investing $100 with 2x leverage means you’re trading $200, but every price movement affects you twice as much. If it drops 50% (a huge change), you lose 100%.)

But also: investing isn’t random chance. You can learn how the markets work and can predict what will happen. This allows you to improve your odds of making money, and reduce your chances of losses. You can also hedge, which means making your trades safer (there are a lot of ways of doing this) and you can move money from failing trades to profitable ones. In gambling... it’s you playing a numbers game against the casino, and their odds are always better — they design the them that way — so over the long term, you will always lose. (This is also where the saying “quit while you’re ahead” comes from.)

They are so vastly different that I really don’t understand where this common misconception comes from.

@purist in gambling it’s supposed to work off calculatable probability crypto is fixed so more random to people not in on when it’s going to fail or boom on schedule

@Root no you just potentially get stuck with something that will never gain value again or get regulated out of existence still

@Root i see you have taken a very pure definition of gambling. What i meant by gambling was "betting on a not so deterministic system against other people who bet". I now realize i am using a non standard ( possibly bogus ) definition myself. My gripe with this is stock market, and crypto trading is not at all investing. For an investment, the person/company who you are investing on should be using the money to create value. Whereas in share market, the money most probably never even sees the company, it just circulates due to speculation about the company.

But you are right, the right word should be Speculation not gambling.

Time and time again, markets have shown us they are mostly unpredictable, and hedge funds still manage to make money off it because they are only marginally better off than the average person.

@MadMadMadMrMim

“Stuck with something that will never gain value again”

To be fair, this does happen. Coins and and do go to zero, but it’s such a tiny percentage of the market that it’s not worth considering, let alone worrying about. It happens more often in the stock market with companies going bankrupt, but in both instances... you should do research before buying something. If the coin/company is struggling, don’t buy it. Simple as that.

How do you determine if it’s struggling? Look at the chart. The charts typically show lots of signs before any major changes; it’s a matter of learning to recognize them. But for something that’s “going to zero”... the charts make it bloody obvious.

“Regulated out of existence” — examples? I really can’t think of a single instance of this happening. Okay, some companies failing because they relied on something that got regulated out of existence; that happens. I actually worked for a company where this happened. But again, research prevails.

Know what you’re buying, or don’t buy it. And if you do buy something, keep up on it. And keep watching its charts!

@purist You’re right, it’s speculation :)

Also, hedge funds make quite a bit more than they give back to consumers. And banks make quite a bit more than those — the overwhelming majority of their income comes from carefully managing investments, not fees and loan interest.

Also, your definition of “investing” does make sense. But you could say that traders like myself are investing in themselves, not the businesses. 😄

For example, we turned $14k into around $90k in less than a year by carefully managing our ... speculations :)

Guys I will appreciate if you will give ++'s

@ostream Recently a Fantasy sports app for a sport called Cricket, got banned where i live, because it caused a lot of people to die. The results arent random there too. But we can see how betting on a cricket match is gambling.

Also i find it difficult how this is illegal. But trading in derivatives isnt ? Both of them are almost identical, and the way stock trading is done, that also isnt far off.

Sherlock

I predicted the last local top before the crash to within a couple hundred dollars.

Followed it long enough have a good idea where it's going.

I'll tell you this much, when a DOD mouthpiece (musk) for u.s. industrial lithium interests (gotta get that Afghan opium for the domestics on strategic-mineral-reserves pretexts!), spins the party line about environmentalism against something, the big swinging dicks that *actually* make decisions in the US have decided they don't like the project.

Which probably means they have their own alternative up their sleeve. Par for the course really. It's why Cocaine Cowboy McAfee was shilling now-mainstream altcoins. Fuck if I remember. Ethereum?
I recall him pushing bitcoin cash.

Makes sense too. China owns significant chunks of the btc network (as well as other factors like Iran, and I can't blame them what with the economic blockades)

DOD knows US intelligence is pulling for wall Street's bottom-line which is more shit from China, and the US military just realized its pretty much alone in protecting domestic interests *at all*, culturally, economically, and politically.

So us domestic industrialists, in the banks that serve them, as opposed to International interests, are making sure the advantages that Global competitors have do not leave the u.s completely edged out.

Expect broader u.s restrictions on bitcoin, more hassle, more tracking, and more volatility, as the u.s. seeks to drive it's own coins to parity with btc, while also buying up btc to gain better leverage.

This is just a cursory analysis. No doubt one already done by many major investment banks. And if you look at their holdings of crypto you can definitely see vast increase in their speculation and hedging. The banks are betting on crypto being big. And they're betting big.

Expect a lot of down periods, sudden surges, and flash crashes. Also it's important to identify which coins domestic US policy is backing AGAINST btc.

Lastly on the more kooky front, you read Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse, I always thought crypto looked suspiciously like the Phoenix currency talked about in that book.

As Bugs Bunny says: That's all folks!

F y i written with voice to text. So pardon any snafus.

@Wisecrack You are in a geopolitics mood arent you !?

@purist very. I enjoy it tremendously. Can't say I'm too well informed, only that it's a fascinating topic.
And what's going on with crypto has everything to do with geopolitics right now.