Jun

6

How I got out of Florida condos at the top:

1) The tennis pro at the building became a realtor.
2) The fellow who installed my window treatments became a realtor.
3) Hurricane season was approaching.
4) A "ballerina" I knew quite well told me to delay selling my condo until she could take the newly instituted 5 day cram course to get a realtor license for which there was a several month waiting list.

This week I heard from a fashion model eagerly desirous of entering the coin market who had opened up accounts at several shops and was mad because they had a waiting period for her buying of various coins.

The conventions on coin presentations were oversold and standing room only.

Sad I can't hand out a statistical answer to document the froth, but there are many.

1) Control of more than 50% of the coins potentially weakens the security.
2) The leaked ability of the hackers to enter any computer in multiple ways retrospectively.
3) The advent of access to quantum cloud computers by corporations in beta (which means govts have had access longer)
4) The untested nature of the post-quantum algos.
5) The need for the governments to track and tax money flows.
6) The investigation powers newly needed to stop ransom attacks requiring payment of coins to "anonymous" wallets.

Andy Aiken writes: 

Possibly some lessons are:

Techies, anarchocapitalist utopians, Chinese elites, even ordinary people desire a currency not controlled by the state, that offers privacy and security without requiring armed guards for a big gold stash.

The financial technology and payment processing systems for USD, Euro, etc are antiquated and slow, decades behind what is feasible and in reach, struggling under a mountain of regulation.

A currency is what people use to pay for things. When the European banking system was in shambles after WW II, people paid for food with cigarettes. Scrip has been used many times throughout history.

Getting financing for a company by working with bankers is an expensive, frustrating experience.  Business founders will find a way to cut the middlemen out of the game if they don’t add value.
 
The cryptocurrency mkt is definitely frothy. As with the dot com bubble, most of the coins & firms will fail.  Some will go on to be the future Amazons. These human needs are in search of a solution even if all of cryptocurrency goes to zero tomorrow.

Orson Terrill writes: 

Same here, starting about 2 weeks ago, yet again, people are asking me about bitcoin. This has usually coincided with near term top, and has been true since 2012. Same for stocks.

anonymous writes: 

I do some consulting in this area, and last week I had a few calls (one from a PE firm) come in asking me for a general overview of the competitive crypto landscape, including who mines, what the pecking order of coins is (in terms of best, most used, etc.) and so on; stuff that could pretty easily be found on the web, by haunting Reddit, etc.

Froth indeed.

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

Thanks to Andy Aiken, I have been able to get some sense of how Bitcoin actually trades. Also thanks to him, I learned - yet again - the most important lesson about trading: you can't claim to understand a market if you don't actually trade it.

I don't trade Bitcoin and have absolutely no idea what will happen to the markets for it. But, it does seem to me that the participants in the markets for cryptocurrencies - whether long or short - are making one assumption that is simply not proven by the evidence.

Bitcoin is not a currency. Neither, for that matter, are ounces of gold. These days a currency is an IOU that

(1) is accepted as a credit for deposit by the banks that are willing to use that currency as a unit of account; (2) is accepted as final payment for taxes and legal judgments; and (3) is the face denomination for the government debts that are accepted as officially-sanctioned reserves for financial institutions

That Bitcoin is not a legal tender has not mattered in the slightest as far as the traders in Bitcoin are concerned.

In the days when money was coin, there was a long history of unofficial credits being actively traded and readily exchanged and even accepted for deposit. The Virginia lawyers who most closely followed Washington as President (Jefferson, Madison) were infuriated by the speculation they saw in New York over the debts that were to be redeemable in the country's new money. They were themselves active speculators, as Washington had been; but their gambles and savings were in warrants and other paper claims on the Western lands. When the people who support and believe in Bitcoin argue that the digital claims they have bought or mined are as "real" than as the digits that represent the vast bulk of people's dollar/pound/Euro/yen/renminbi "money" (sic), they are absolutely right. Bitcoins and dollars are both simply collective promises that what is represented has the value of scarcity and is not counterfeit, and they both have to be taken on faith.

There is only one problem. Governments, as Hamilton demonstrated, have a serious interest in having their official fictions take precedence. The risk of any Bitcoin "bubble" is that, in the name of the protection of official legal tender, unofficial digits may find themselves being investigated for their risks of "fraud". Government can always be relied on to investigate others for having committed the very sins that the government wants to preserve for its own spiritual authority. 

Anatoly Veltman writes: 

Centrals may investigate and outlaw whatever they wish - but since they've encouraged the vastness of the internet, it's impossible for them to replace the cork. Eventually, they'll be adapters of a protocol.

anonymous writes: 

And that is exactly the point.

With crypto there are no groups of individuals painstakingly crafting bills in basements OR shadowy dictators buying eight figure currency printing machines from manufacturing facilities in Bavaria or Switzerland. Even if governments manage to cripple or persecute the Bitcoiners - (who? miners? users? developers? writers? consultants?) - there are as I type this 735 existing crypto issues, over 100 crypto assets, and thousands of tokens trading in nearly 4000 markets of varying mechanisms and liquidity around the world. Far more important than that, each day tens of thousands of new minds are brought into the crypto sphere, some of whom are brilliant programmers both (a) eager to outdo the best of what is currently available, and (b) eager to get rich. There is no, absolutely no, putting the proverbial genie back in the equally-proverbial bottle.


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