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Same Narratives. Also, Bitcoin!
A largely unchanged narrative greeted traders and investors Thursday as lawmakers in Washington pressed ahead with laborious negotiations aimed at cementing a lame duck virus relief bill.
Ultimately, the package of measures may not be cleared until the weekend, technically beyond the "deadline." But as we've learned time and again, the word "deadline" has virtually no meaning, unless it's in the literal context of the people suffering both economically and otherwise from the virus. In their cas
The way I see this craziness with bitcoin/cryptos is this: Every day one or two more narcissistic hedge fund managers use other people’s money to go to the casino with “dollar signs (note- not crypto’s)”, in their eyes. GLTA
Is there a chance that bitcoin will ever be anything more than a computer algorithm. It’s seems to just be a speculative bubble at the moment, but I see more mainstream financial companies committing to buy in. Are they just trying to boost returns via market timing or is there some possible explanation for how it could become an actual store of wealth. In the last week I’ve heard so called financial professionals claim they’ve calculated it’s will go to $400k. $23k still seems idiotic to me, but maybe I’m missing something.
It just is what it is… I don’t know why anyone obsesses over it. It’s a gamble. If people want to gamble, that’s great. Go gamble. I hope they all get rich. But personally, I would never introduce something like that into my own accounts because it’s just too much trouble on multiple levels. The volatility means the returns need to be huge to make it worthwhile, and nobody ever seems to want to mention the fact that if you’re running any kind of business and you have a sizable income, it’s a potential accounting nightmare. I cannot even fathom the headache involved in trying to incorporate something like that into my books. In my opinion, it’s just asking for tax scrutiny. If you’ve got unlimited accounting resources and can just throw it all to them and pay whatever you’ve gotta pay to get it all straight, then that’s fine. But it ain’t for me. My accountant would freak out if I tried to invest in that.
Add to that the IRS announcement of a new question about bitcoin holdings and/or transactions on the 1040, p1 this year and it’s clear the tax man wants your gains, sooner rather than later.
I mean there is a lot to be said about how it’s all crazy but imagine for a second you have family in say Africa and live in the US. You want to transfer money home to your family. Most money transfer services charge 15-20% in service fees or are extremely unreliable and tedious. You could imagine using something like Stellar Lumens at $0.20 a coin to transfer money for 0.5% in fees in seconds instead of 2-3 days. All it would take is regulatory adoption in African nations which is in the works in some currently. Many use cell phones for banking already. Now imagine this technology whichever coin becomes most useful manages to allow an entire continent to rapidly gain banking services on par with first world countries with access to funding from overseas. What kind of economic development would that allow?
Technology is often about what you can do that you couldn’t before and a trustless ledger is something we couldn’t do before and we are generally spoiled by the idea that trustworthy institutions are readily available. That’s not a historic nor global given.