Stock Market and Bitcoin this AM

Stocks are down in this morning's selloff. Bitcoin is down 23% at the open, down over $10,000 per coin. It is now 40% off its 2021 high.

Investors who purchased on margin are now having to sell stocks. The downward push is especially pronounced in technology stocks.

Elon Musk announced this week that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin. Another rumor was that Musk was selling his Bitcoin.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/bitcoin-price-falls-on-china-crypto-warning

Won't be long now and there will be a buying opportunity.

Bitcoin will retest its high someday and most likely blow it out of the water.

"China bans Bitcoin" is a tale as old as time and has become one of the funniest memes in the space. The next article will be about how "China controls Bitcoin". Haha. Mainstream/corporate media never disappoints.

For those of you investing in Bitcoin, should be enlightened that its trying to replace the US dollar as world currency. If/ when that happens your banks account and 401 k will be worthless.

The Chinese are trying to start their crypto currency for the same reason. Take down the petro dollar.

Your literally investing in the demise of the US economy.

Not this trapper.

Not invested in crypto, but in reality, nobody is working harder to destroy the dollar than the Treasury and the Fed. Creating trillions outta thin air only devalued what was in existence.

Gold and Silver no crypto or paper

Almost like they are working towards the same goal. Why would that be?????

When you think about how the economists say money is simply a measurement tool that you trade for items you wish to purchase or use...

We may need a bigger tape to measure!

I'm thinking about investing a small amount( few hundred) in one or two of the crypto that are at a fraction of a cent. If it goes to nothing it was worth the entertainment. If they go up to .20 I'm a millionaire.

Or I could blow that 300 in 20 min on my range.


I don't have any faith in them but would be something to play with and probably better odds than the lottery.

Look around......everything is in a bubble except what you have in your pocket for cash...the worth of that is going down daily.

When it is optimal for whoever is planning to take over the world financially they will drop the hammer...

Bitcoin isn't "trying to do" anything. Its just a distributed database protocol. No one is in charge of it. It can't think or plan anything.

The dollar is going to kill itself, with or without Bitcoin existing. It has to happen. Technology is deflationary and is expanding faster than we can even comprehend. Prices can't continually fall or our system collapses due the nature of our fiat monetary system. Therefore the amount of money that will need to be printed to keep things afloat the coming years is unfathomable. Money printer just getting started.

The Chinese (and the US) want to switch to a CBDC (central bank digital currency) for the simple fact they would have more even power/ control over citizenry and monetary policy. They could easily tell you how you can spend your money, where you can spend, who can you can send money to. They could even set an expiration on your money to increase spending boosting the economy.

Hey bright side is if the petro-dollar fails at least we can maybe stop dropping pallets of cash overseas and my friends/classmates can stop needlessly dying in the middle east.

You'll be better off with the lottery than in any of the thousands of scammy "cheap" coins that play into your unit bias and have flashy marketing. Short term you may get lucky, long term you're guaranteed to lose IMO. Here's why:

Network Effect: Bitcoin has already captured enough network effect it will be extremely hard to top. It has the name, it has the infrastructure, etc. Don't think of "crypto-currencies" like companies, think of them like a bunch of new internets competing. Almost all the innovation happens on the one that is most transparent and with the most network effect.

Distribution: Bitcoin was fairly distributed. It was worthless for several years while the code was open source and available for anyone to participate (still is open). Every new "crypto" coin after it had/has predetermined winners and losers. Bitcoin has almost a biblical "immaculate conception" type story. Pseudonymous creator, hasn't spent a single UTXO. The 2nd biggest "crypto" not only has a face that still controls it, it also had about 70% of the initial supply that was held by insiders at launch.

Decentralization: 10's of thousands (if not 100's of thousands) are running the bitcoin protocol on supercomputers all the way down to tiny little home assembled raspi computers. These are nodes, not to be confused with miners. Nodes keep everyone in the system honest and also allow one to verify that they hold the underlying UTXO's ("coins") for themselves. Most new "crypto's" have taken the easy scaling bait and tried to be "all things on the blockchain". The amount of data they need store is enormous with lead to only specialized hardware being able to run nodes which price out "the little guy" from verifying the system for themselves. We just end back where we are now....."Trusted third parties are security holes". Bitcoin has taken a layered approach to scaling, keep the base as simple as possible for everyone then build upon, just like how our internet mostly operates.

I could go on but I'll leave it at that. Good luck gambling either way.

They said the same thing about the Euro 10-15 years ago...

That is about the same as saying that someone who is 90 years old with covid that dies and the doctor lists the cause of death as Covid. Forget the fact that gentleman smoked his entire life, was overweight, and had stage 4 cancer.



The US dollar will only be taken down by our arrogance and deficit spending.

Im heavily invested in lead and powder.

Brass, copper, silver and gold. And I’m about to sell the copper to make room for more brass

Yep. That was the plan for the Euro as well to replace the Dollar. That didn't happen, but now here's the same EU globalist trying again.

"Its created by computers no one is in charge" Yea right. lol

All I'm hearing is buy, buy, and buy. Crypto is not for the weak at heart. It swings wildly. Best to get it and forget it.

I prefer diversity I'm not all that old. I have learned from some people that have done very well in their lifetimes. I'm definitely going to be buying this week I am just waiting to see if it can go down some more. For those of you that just shake your head at crypto there were millionaires made overnight that were likely told the same thing just a few short years ago. I don't put anything in one basket but if there's an opportunity to make some money I'm in. I've been investing in silver/gold for at least 10 years, I have a balanced 401k that looks very promising for my future who knows what will happen by the time I retire, and I am now supplementing that with crypto. I've had days where I've made 6-7 times my money. That isn't going to happen with a dollar bill in your pocket or buried in the yard.

What gives crypto currency value? The dollar is backed by U.S. military might.

Scarcity, well except for doge, and application is what gives cryptos value.

Cryptos rebounding in the last hour...

At least you didn't say gold I've gotten into some of the platforms and links within crypto. Everyone has been focused on the coins themselves. With a little research there's a lot of money to be made outside the coins. Take MATIC for example. I was going to buy in up to $0.50 a share and waited till it dipped to $0.33 and bought 6,000 shares. Today it's at $2.17. My $2,000 investment is over $13,000. Not a bad profit for 3 weeks of patience.

i dont understand it at all

A simple, overgeneralized way to think of cryptos is that they are payment processors similar to credit card/merchant service companies.

Decoy I won't quibble your point but last I heard the military is still voluntary.

If one is interested in 'investing' in Bitcoin, there are other, and IMO better, ways to go about it other than buying bitcoin. You can still gain exposure to the btc market but with less volatility and greater safety.

Thanks for the discount Elon!

Bitcoin's value comes from its utility. It's wealth that you can fully control. Wealth that you can verify the supply of now or in future. Wealth that is completely separate from any governing entity. Wealth you can store in your brain as you cross a border. You could say Bitcoins value come the ability to use it as a tool to be more self sovereign. IMO its a tool that will be extremely necessary in the coming future.

Bitcoin is not backed by anything and that is what's makes it great. It creates no 3rd party liabilities. Things that are "backed" require storage, security and worst of all trust in a persons or group not to debase the supply. If Bitcoin was "backed" it would not have any of the utility described above.

I never said it wasn't

The millions of "cryptos" may be trying to do this but this is definitely NOT what Bitcoin is at all. Way too narrow thinking. If I had make a comparison to something it would be to think of the Bitcoin network as a new internet. An internet of money. There will be many layers built upon the Bitcoin network just as there are many layers to the internet (email, websites, forums, streaming video, cloud databases, ect, ect) and its constantly evolving. One of those layers will offer instant transaction settlement, ie a "payment processor".

who invented crypto? somebody already wealthy or somebody who has since accumulated great wealth. Was it really as simple as saying this IS money. computer money?????

FWIW the Emperor of the fairy tale really was naked.

What stops the bitcoin "bank" from being hacked? When it is are there any insurance plans?

I hate the word "crypto", it makes me cringe. It's short for cryptography which is a computer privacy tool. Most "cryptos" are scams and were created to steal from who don't understand Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was created by a person or group under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto". Here is the WHITEPAPER if you'd like to read it but its kinda technical. He/she/they mined a lot of early coins as they helped to bootstrap the network with many other cryptographers and computer nerds. It had no value for the first ~2 years until a few people started trading goods/services for coins. This Saturday celebrates one of the first Bitcoin transactions when a guy named Laszlo traded 10,000 BTC for 2 Papa Johns Pizzas, now known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day". Satoshi stepped away from the project as the network gained traction and decentralized with 100's of developers from around the world working on it and running the network nodes. None of those early coins owned by Satoshi have ever moved (the Bitcoin ledger is fully transparent and its easy to tell which coins where Satoshis in the very early days).

is "mining" a euphemism for creating out of thin air?

All you need to "hack" Bitcoin is to overpower it with more computing power than currently secures it (miners).

Therefore basically you'd need enough electricity to power a medium size country along with $$$Billions of dollars worth of specially designed computers. You'd have to build these new Power Plants and computers covertly without anyone figuring it out. All that work would get you a few minutes to create a few 'double spends" which could hurt the network temporarily. It has gotten to the point where this is not even a realistic possibility. Most of the other "cryptos" are not even remotely this robust and could easily be attacked. This system I just described is called "Proof of Work" (POW). Its very hard to create new digital coins and even harder to create counterfeits. Gold and gold mining is basically POW. Hard to create, hard to forge. This is why gold is/was a decent store of value.

There are no "insurance plans", ie no bailouts in Bitcoin. Other "cryptos" have had bailouts (transactions reversed) because they have centralized control.



Bitcoin mining takes extraordinary amounts of electricity and super specialized computing equipment. Not exactly "thin air" but you can call it what you want.

Disclaimer: I'm only responding to this thread with only my self interests in mind. Writing about something in my own words helps me to better understand the subject. I don't think anyone here should buy Bitcoin unless they understand what they are buying. I barely understand Bitcoin. Elon Musk doesn't even understand Bitcoin

You have done a really good job explaining btc and the questions have been really good

Danny to simpy what Decoy said, no the blockchain cannot be hacked. No it's not created out of thin air. It's expensive to mine bitcoin.

Decoy explained it in a way I can not, my only disagreement with him is gold is/was not a decent store of value. It always will be the best.

Ohh this is a fun debate.

You have to agree that Gold has definitely failed as "medium of exchange". Its failed on several fronts which led to it being centralized and therefore corrupted. Gold is not easily to divide therefore hard to spend/make change. Gold is heavy and hard to transport, especially in a more global world we have have now. Its hard to verify its the real thing (counterfeit gold plated tungsten as an example) without sophisticated equipment. Gold is easy to confiscate (executive order 6102). It failed when became what " backs" a piece of paper. because you had to trust the party(s) storing it. Any new "gold backed" currency, if tried, will just suffer the same fate long term.

Now I will acknowledge you didn't say gold will always be the best "money", you said it will always be the best "store of value". I have to disagree here on the simple fact that the supply of new gold is not finite and not predictable. Who knows what insane technological advances could come in the next 10 years, 50 years or 100 years to be able to extract more gold from earth or from the stars. Technology happens exponentially and it very hard for us to wrap our heads around that. The crazy things that have happened in the last 20 years (you now carry a super computer in your pocket) will be far eclipsed by what happens in the next 10. The next 5 years after that are unimaginable and so on it goes exponentially.

FYI I know how many BTC will exist next year, 10 years from now, 50, 100.....and that the very last sliver of all 21 million Bitcoin will finally be in circulation in the year 2140. Because Bitcoin IS a technology (thin air backed by nothing, wink) the new advances will be used to better secure it rather than exploit it like it does physical resources.

99.9% of stuff today is a scam.

"Gold has failed as a medium of exchange", I can go anywhere on the planet and exchange it.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't dismiss the value of Bitcoin, I'm just not ready to concede it's "digital" gold. In my mind there is as good of a chance we'll devolve instead of evolve.

Sure we could find a way to synthesize gold or we could go mine an asteroid, we could also increase the supply of Bitcoin. Even though it's capped at 21 million it's not entirely impossible to raise that cap, unlikely but not impossible.

When the 3 Gorges Dam blows, How will that affect Bitcoin ?

Bogus!

How can I trade/sell Bitcoin when the power is out or my internet is down? I missed out on thousands of dollars in gains when my exchange malfunctioned during a crypto spike. I prefer gold and silver to secure wealth and crypto/Bitcoin for quick profits. Only until more regulations come forward.

Imagine if there is an actual crash, a for real huge crash and all this inflated wealth winds up to be worth nada......the stock market, crypto, 401k's, retirement funds, ssi, pensions, a dollar worth .05 cents a dollar.....lop off two or three zeros from all holdings......there is so much inflated wealth it will make the end of the roman empire look like a kindergarten skit.....the great depression will look like a good time.....back then folks knew how to survive......well quite a bit did but not everyone.....today most folks are just dumb azzes....fat and content...like dipstick.

Some things that will and do have value are: property, food, medicine, clothing, and fuel/energy. That will never change. During the last depression what hurt the most was the loss of the value to labor for others.

If it all crash's again I worry not just about how helpless most people are, but also how violent. People today think that if someone else has something they need, (or even just want) then the person who has it is obligated to give to the person who doesn't. If the haves don't give the have nots their goods, the have nots own the right to take by force from the haves. This attitude is becoming more and more common.

If we have another crash people are going to band together in tribes again. At least those who survive the first 6 months or so.

Skills/abilities have value and they cannot be stolen/taken unless your enslaved.

From the flavor of some of these posts, do some think humans may not be evolving quite as fast as they should toward a better version of humanity?

I don't think humanity has evolved much at all. Peoples is peoples.
Always have been.
Always will be.


Ol Sigmund labeled humans creatures of aggression and sexual impulses.
Ol Charles said humans as a species evolve as the strong propagate and the weak are culled.
Suuurrrreeeee.

As a biologist myself, I witness science is an inexact science most every time because it changes every generation or so but as the current post-modern era religion, it's holding up pretty well under the confusion of climate change, philosophy, political strife, and such.

Bitcoin and crypto is a very interesting development. It appeals to the basic "get me some" in humans that Freud wrote extensively on.
I smile each time I hear someone some Dogecoin when I can clearly read that it is a dog-e-coin. Now that's funny.
A few win. Most lose.
There's a lot of that going around.
Peoples is what peoples does.
Dog coins are just the latest merry-go-round.
Might as well get me some. Everyone else is doing it.
Where else have we heard this?
I think I said it to my mom more than once back in high school.

Blessings,
Mark

Dogecoin was quite literally started as a joke.
While nobody knows what comes, I would encourage delving into becoming educated on crypto.
It’s getting to be about that time....

Oh, no doubt. We'll all be in graph from in another hundred or two hundred years. Cool graph. I think there may be a tiny Renminbi Yuen just above the USA on the graph?

Yes.



If gold is valuable we will find it and retrieve it. We humans are greedy like this.

As you know Bitcoin is extremely difficult to change. Nearly all participants need to agree on changes. Raising the 21 million cap would require all participants to fight natural human greed and devalue their own holdings.

Its 2021, without power or the internet our society will collapse in a very short amount of time. Your gold bars or bags of silver might work well to beat your neighbor in the head with when he tries to steal your last remaining food or water.

Yeah the crypto casinos have never faired very well with volatility. Imagine what their security is like. This is why I use Bitcoin only exchanges and custody myself.

What specific aspect of Bitcoin/"crypto" is currently unregulated or what specific regulations would you like to see?

Good morning Mark. I'm glad you brought this up. I hope you and others aren't ready anything into my writings here about Bitcoin that it in any way creates any sort of utopia. "Peoples is peoples" for sure, that will never change.

I smile as my flesh says, "go get me some," and I reflect on that urge. I don't have any crypto but as I listen to about everyone I know get on the train (get rich trains always have passengers) I have no illusions it's attached to utopia. That wasn't what I was thinking.

I just enjoy witnessing the human psyche reasoning behind, "do I get in?" or "do I stay out?" or "do i....."
Fascinating.

But then the Lord knows I turn up the volume when Jerry Reed song comes on Willy's Roadhouse station;
My luck was so good I could do no wrong
I jest kept on rollin' and controllin' them bones
And finally they jest threw up their hands and said
"When you hot, you hot"

The percentage of total mining taking place in China way overblown IMO and it decreases by the day.

During the rainy season many miners to move to these hydro facilities because they over produce electricity, therefor electricity is dirt cheap and miners are more profitable.

Lets say the dam blows and takes out 30% of Bitcoins hash power (mining). New Bitcoin blocks (groups of transactions) would happen roughly 30% slower than the normal 10 minute average, so a 13 minute average. Fees would increase significantly to get a transaction through because block space would be more scarce. The network itself adjusts the difficulty to mine every 2 weeks, it will recognize these slower block times and the difficulty of mining will be adjusted down to get that target back closer to 10 minutes average. It is a self righting ship.

Simple Rules:

Work hard. Only buy what you really need and live below your means. Don't go into debt. Prepare for the worst. Save and invest everything else in something easily explained and understood.

Stay out of casinos and don't "invest" in something peddled in internet chat rooms no matter how "rich" you might get.

I remember when everyone was going to get rich on ostriches.

I'm not buying any Bitcoin until Gordon Liddy or William Devane says to... Lol

Ol dad

Well China is starting to sound like it's about to get stiffer on it's ban on Bitcoin so that might not matter so much soon. News of that is partially the reason for the recent crash.

This is how a poor person can do well for sure.

But if you have some assets to start the best thing you can do (because of the nature of our inflationary monetary system) is leverage those assets, take on debt to acquire more assets. Then just keep doing that. This is why since 1971 we've seen the gap between "poor and rich" explode.

Now the very best overall way to get rich is be close possible to the money printer/Fed gov. Elon Musk's is the richest person on the planet and none of his companies would come close to turning a profit without subsidies. That's how it done.

So how much electricity is consumed by this mining?

No offense but "you must be new here". Seriously, "China bans Bitcoin" is a near monthly headline since 2013. Maybe this time is different

Google trends search:

This reminds me of the landscaper/investment guru Bob.

You're dealing with people investing based on a lot of hype. News stories get more attention than deserved. The more cryptos stay out of the news, they happier I am.

Bitcoin consumes a very large amount of electricity and it will need it to continue the need to do so in order to succeed.

In order to be profitable to mine Bitcoin one needs the cheapest electricity possible. Most of the cheapest electricity is electricity that has supply but no demand. Examples like above when I wrote about hydro mining in China. The over-produce power in the rainy season so Bitcoin miners consume the waste electricity on the cheap. Another example is flared gas in the USA. Miners are setting up shop all over at facilities that would otherwise be flaring wasted gas. The gas is getting hooked up to generators which are powering Bitcoin miners. Another example is wind turbines at night can produce a massive amount of electricity but is has very little demand. Miners run when its profitable and get turned off during the day when its not. So when you see in the new "Bitcoin uses enough to power a country" you may want to consider how much of that would have otherwise been wasted.

I don't want to fully "green wash" Bitcoin mining. Its uses a lot of electricity, some of it is coal powered.

Tune out the TV/news/social media headlines, every aspect of your life will be better for it.

This short term volatility doesn't bother me a bit. I have a long term thesis and I simply buy a small amount of Bitcoin every week regardless of price.

Won't we need this extra electricity for the EV fleet to charge up at nite?
I see a real supply problem ahead!!!

Not even close, although I'm a precious metals bug who reluctantly owns some bitcoin, the dollar is going to lose reserve status. Whether it's this year or in ten years it will happen

I wasn't talking about you. I have read enough of your posts to know your stance. I know you are a metals bug and I get your reasoning.

I'm talking about someone else who has lots of quick answers probably gleaned from lots of relatively recent internet "research". Someone who I want to ask: how much crypto do you actually own? But, that's not polite and I am pretty sure I know the answer.

This is the big money institutions manipulating the price of crypto before the next parabolic swing-up that is going to happen in the next five months.

You know what else requires a lot of electricity, the banking industry, Wall Street, MSNBC, and the rest of the main stream media. The Mint printing off all these dollar bills is using up a lot of electricity as well.

Just how is the energy / electricity burnt up calorically ? In Bitcoin mining...for the layman ?

Without getting into the mining aspects and why - A 2018 testimony claimed 5 gigawatts. That's 1% of the worlds energy use. For mining. As of 3 years ago.
In 2021 - Cambridge claims 110 terawatt hours, or, 0.55% of global production.

If you would like, I could cryptographically sign a message on the Bitcoin blockchain proving my ownership of a UTXO that last moved in 2016.

I'm not so much of a metals bug as anti fiat currency. The first time I entered the Bitcoin space was before 2016, I'll admit it was a lark I didn't understand the space until I started to do a bunch of research on it around 18 or so. My research leads me to believe Decoy knows what he is talking about and can express far better than I ever could.

Here is something to think about, I believe the opportunity to get "rich" from Bitcoin has passed

Yeah people expecting Bitcoin (or even more so "crypto") to be a "get rich quick" investment are going to get very rekt. Especially all the wanna-be traders, which is most of population these days.

On the contrary though Bitcoin (IMO) is the best "avoid getting very poor" insurance we have against massive inflation and encroaching State control over every aspect of our lives. Both inflation and tyranny being inevitabilities because we're way past voting reversing either. I say this because the public appetite for pain required to reverse monetary policy, cut spending, cut entitlements and the therefore increase personal responsibility is near zero.

I think I'll dream up a monetary system and put it on the market. Nothing behind it for security. Just a SCAM!

What really backs the dollar in your pocket? Here's a hint danny hit it on the head a few pages back

Is this for reaL?????????????? Bitcoin miners? Does that mean theft? Is this a scam or are things real and working?



https://apextominer.com/en_gb/

Yes they are real, new bitcoins are "mined" using equipment like that.

Decoy or Sniper would be better suited to explain the mining process.

I am thinking it must not be real profitable or the guys building them would just have them "mining".

Using that logic, Caterpillar should be mining, building roads, farming, etc.

Not really. All you need to do with a computer "miner" from what I gather is hook it up and turn it on.

If it was that simple everybody would be doing it.

Access to a cheap power supply is a must. It's said that in areas of China power can be purchased for 4 cents a kwh.

I would venture at todays prices it's a pretty lucrative endeavor

i never have understood derivatives either

Never been to Vegas?(regarding derivatives).

Instead of discussing the sins of bitcoin, the public and politicians should be discussing the sins of fiat currency.

Instead we will blame China, Russia and bitcoin for the dollars fall.

A decentralized base of exchange is a good thing. I'd prefer a gold standard.

Bitcoin and other cryptos that are mined are done by setting up specialized computers to do mathematical calculations in order to confirm transactions. Not really profitable these days for most people as the reward values are getting tinier and tinier as time goes on. Something on the order finding a tiny fleck of flour gold after sifting a coal truck worth of dirt.