I think what is kind of interesting, is why would any poker player be qualified to promote a crypto currency? What do they know that we don't? The founders of these crypto projects know that poker players are the biggest degens and will happily invest in some crypto project if it has a 1% chance of going to the moon.

As if you are going to make money trading options.

Warren Buffett the greatest money maker of all time tells you the only way you can win is buy buying a diversified group continuously such as the S and P 500 and holding for life.

The idea that you are going to come in trading options and make money is a joke. The big trading houses will eat you alive.

You give one example of a stock Twitter which performed poorly since it IPO'd in 2014. But pretty much every other stock in the Nasdaq is up 8 times since then.

Twitter is down because it IPO'd at a 30 billion dollar valuation and it only had 1.4 billion in revenue in 2014. It was over valued.

You are mocking people for buying and holding Bitcoin, but since the Tiwitter IPO Bitcoin has gone from 300 to 40,000.

You are the one who doesn't know what you are taking about.

You're the fish that wall street rinses dry.

I know thats a bit mean but its just the harsh truth.

Keep buying good solid businesses and some Bitcoin through good and bad never sell and in 40 years you will be thanking me.

Trading options is almost a sure fire way to go broke. The few people I know that have hit home runs on a trade or two have all lost it back.

Been trading options for 20 years.
Very few are good at it since . . .

A) they dont have a proven, backtested system to use, and then abide by it militantly
B) Dont respect their stops
C) Dont use spreads and just aim for grandslams
D) Just have no idea what they are doing

Trading options is serious business and those of us who are disciplined can do very well.
It takes someone who is willing to put in the time to study it every day
Going over years and years of past charts, updating current charts every night
Putting your ego aside and just following the rules of your system
Think the average schmuck can do that?
Most people are too lazy, and that's why only a few can trade options successfully

I have no need to prove to you that I do it and do it very very well


My posts speak for themselves, I know what I am doing.

Just get Elon to tweet about it /s

@ Bumner

Okay fair play.

Best of luck on the Grind.

Bump,

They got sued again..

https://www.poker.org/hellmuth-front...in-california/

Knowing Hellmuths stellar history of shilling frauds, he will not give back 1c.

Since he was in the examples I've seen very up front that he was being paid to shill the product he is likely safe.

insane how person like Helmuth could brag about being involved into games and public relationships with top USA figures. To this day I didnt received my 10k$ from UltimateBet. Lesson learned and I didnt invest into his new idea. I hope one day Phil Helmuth gonna buy him self a better hat at least.

the most incredible part is it's somehow still above $0.00

Crypto is like tattoos

I never thought that a trend/fad so obviously stupid would last so long

Crypto's peak at BTC $70K was the perfect "pets.com" and "negative amortization" red flag for a market top.
I guess the difference is, literal high school kids couldnt get in on the other two to keep it afloat as long as crypto has.

They've been literally nothing more than a trading vehicle with zero intrinsic value since their inception.
Amazon and walmart do not accept them for payment. So, WTF is the point other than for trading?
It's a "currency" that can not spent anywhere. Sooooo, is it really a currency?
BTC has as much real value as VIX contracts.

The run up to $70K was fun to watch and it let a lot of idiots claim brilliance and victory prior to $70K
(And hopefully they claimed victory by selling)
But the past two years have shown the inevitable.
Lots of people have gotten extremely hurt as the parabolic rise did what parabolic rises always do.
Collapse.

How to protect the young, ambitious, and ignorant from themselves is a question that has not been solved for millenia.

The worst of the crypto collapse is yet to come. If you still cant see that it's all a giant scam . . . wow.

You know there is a bitcoin thread in BFI. Might be more appropriate for general crypto rant

I can respect someone who has been successfully trading options for years. I spent a lot of time looking at various options pricing models about 35 years ago, but decided that a single small -time trader would get crushed by the cost of trading with much frequency and run over when the market, foolishly perhaps ,moved against positions a trader might hold in the short term Good for you, I had neither the appetite or desire for the work you need to master.

When crypto emerged, I saw it differently starting around 2010 , as scalability, discoverable pricing, and entry and exit from positions was quite easy in an actively traded currency. (I never had understood archaic market mechanisms for stocks, like paying some houses or traders to "make markets" or maintain central limit order books of some sort.)

The technology is legitimate. The BTC blockchain works quickly and effectively to process trades worldwide, with layered solutions to the built in cost of on-chain trading, and ETH affords a way to trade attached contracts or pretty much anything you might want to design/buy/sell, pretty cheaply, for the cost of some ETH "gas". Used correctly, crypto works well as a tool, regardless of public attention overwhelmingly focused on it as a risky, volatile store of value or investment.

The crypto field of course attracts an incredible percentage of charlatans, fools, liars, scammers, blowhards, poseurs, unreliable promoters, marketers, spokespeople, and just plain ignorant "experts".

Dabble at your risk. Avoid secondary folks like FTX who may be getting high on their own supply, built on customers' liquidity.

people who are generalizing the entire crypto market and its underlying technology and who assess success and failure by looking at prices are all the same, independent of whether they are bullish or bearish on crypto. a crypto hater who thinks that all is just a giant scam without critically differentiating between different aspects is acting just as ignorant as a crypto bro who thinks that decentralization will dominate the future and that they will get rich by investing in crypto currencies.

people with a decent degree of financial and economic literacy and a certain degree of personal and professional humbleness will never discuss a market that is so complex and intertwined with so many economical aspects in a black and white fashion. stay away from anyone who tries to sell it as obvious that an the entire crypto market is a scam or is the future.

and for the record: only because someone has some professional experience in a field it doesn't automatically make them an expert on all related topics. economics & finance is a vast field and it's not natural science, it's social science.

you either manage to deal with an uncertain world or you eventually put your head into your ass and believe that all your formed opinions must be the truth.

Change is the only constant regarding technology. People "with a certain degree of personal and professional humbleness" are not afraid to call things as they see them, contribute to and engage in discussion and learn from it.

I am of the opinion, held for many years now, that blockchain technology, specifically decentralized market applications, ARE the future and much of the present. That said, having viewed over 1,000+ ICOs over the years, I saw only one unicorn, and that was years ago.

Investing in essentially a services company by purchasing its issued token does seem akin to something on the non-coin side of the Howey test if the token value is pegged to company performance. The litigation will be interesting.

Technology as it advances as a tool is a quite different proposition than looking at coins as a store of value or financial investment vehicle. I don't know how you generalize "crypto bros", but the topic does attract a lot of "spokespeople" who are just paid shills and coin issuers who promised/implied a share in the company's future revenue/profits from purchase of its coin.

i'm not sure why or if you thought that my post was a response to yours, it wasn't. i like your posts in here and i largely agree with what you've said.

exactly my point

as people who are incapable or not willing to do the above and think critically, but instead are blindly bullish

>They've been literally nothing more than a trading vehicle with zero intrinsic value since their inception.

This is completely and obviously wrong - it is amazing how many people keep saying this. Crypto has utility both with trust free contracts and a means of value exchange without central mediation. If I want to sent $20 to my cousin in South America who doesn't have a bank account, how do I do that exactly? Like many others, thanks to UltimateBet and the US government, I am blacklisted from sending payments on Moneygram and Western Union. It is very simple and effortless to do this with crypto, and costs just a few cents with litecoin or similar cryptocurrencies. If both parties are immediately converting the crypto to/from fiat there is very little risk of value lost due to price fluctuations. Without crypto I'm not able to send the $20 to my cousin, unless I want to put it in an envelope and pay $8 to mail it with an excellent chance it will be lost or stolen before arriving 3 weeks later. If you can't see the utility in that, nobody can explain it you, and it is exactly why the government and the financial system want to see it banned (and replaced by government-controlled digital currency ala cbdc). This utility has value, thus crypto has value (although not necessarily the absurd value it was driven to by speculators).

Well stated generally , re international transactions.

Add to that speed and certainty, although within the US bank system ACH transactions are also quite competitive.

I can send $100 USD worth of BTC to someone pretty much anywhere and have it received into their BTC address on their end within 1/2 hour. The cost is pennies.

The receiver is generally able to convert BTC to fiat locally for say 2 % to 3% cost for conversion.

Pretty sure you're proving my point.
The BTC itself is useless, as you said, you can use it as a conversion tool to turn your American Dollars into say, Argentine Pesos.
But if you stop in the middle of the conversion and keep it BTC, it's useless, or more accurately "valueless" on its own.
Until it is out of BTC form, you hold nothing but pixels on a screen.
With shares of stock, those pixels mean you own parts of a company
With options those pixels show you control shares of a stock

People have been sending money from rich countries to their relatives in poorer countries for centuries,
bitcoin hardly moves that ball forward any meaningful amount.
Businesses will be more than happy to help you accomplish this for less than $8 and without needing to put it in an envelope.
Has anyone done that in the last 30 years? Your example is pretty weak here.

Also, we dont need literally 10,000 different crypto currencies to serve this task.
Didja know one of the cryptos is called "cum rocket"?
It's totally not a scam

I can meet you halfway that BTC may eventually serve an important purpose, but a decade into its arrival, other than a trading vehicle, one really hasnt emerged.
The "trust free" part . . . not a game changer. Lots of people would prefer to have someone to be held accountable should a transaction go bad.
The whole "NO CENTRAL CONTROLLING AUTHORITY" that cryptos push as a good thing, the vast majority look at you and think, "Wait, that's a GOOD thing?"
I'd like someone to oversee my financial life for accountability sake.

If you're doing something illegal or are so rich you worry a govt will take your money, okay, maybe BTC is a good thing, but instead of govt's stealing it, you have to worry about hackers taking it and since there is "no controlling authority" who ya gonna run to? Hackers are working around the world around the clock right now trying to hack it and take everyone's crypto.

And if one more 20-something says the words "unhackable" . . . it's absurd. Something is only "unhackable" until it isn't.
It's like someone who is "now clean and sober" uh no, they're just in between relapses. Robin Williams relapsed after 20 years sober.

I'll end with this, I live in Chicago and I know a bunch of floor traders (mostly retired) from the CBOE who play at my home poker room and everyone of them says crypto is a joke and no one they know touches the stuff. I'll trust their take over 20-somethings who think they have rediscovered the newest get-rich-quick scheme.

"The Rise and Fall of Crypto" is going to be one amazing documentary someday.


But in the end, you're probably right,
I dont get it.
And I probably wont ever.
And both of our lives will go on unscathed.
Best of luck to you, may all your crypto adventures work out better than you imagined.
I wish you no ill-will. In fact, I wish you all the success.
But please, dont let it all blow up on you.
Be careful.
Maybe someday I'll see the crypto light.
I have been wrong many many MANY times in life.
This may be another case of that.

Not when the government blocks you from using those services. Your argument is what is weak.

Paypal and venmo, I can send money in 10 seconds without having to trade, buy and trade again. Why would I need crypto unless I was doing something illegal and need to make 100s of untraceable payments.

And mail still works. Im still 100% on every birthday and christmas. Card making it in 1 to 5 days for 50 cents

With all due respect to your CBOE trader friends, they should understand that BTC IS simply another commodity, traded worldwide, without regulation being needed and without paying vig to banks and the CBOE. Its pricing is set in an active dynamic decentralized market. Good thing your CBOE buddies avoid crypto, they sound like 7 stud players of 30+ years go.

I think you CAN "get it" if you look at it with the perspective that BTC is a financial commodity.

I grew up in Chicago, during college used poker to make living expenses from future hotshot quant jocks from the U of C business school. A great thing about crypto is how democratic (small "d") it is because it is wholly scalable for small traders. You can model and experiment in actual trading markets for minimum risk, costs and fees historically have been fixed at a %. Yes, you can lose "everything" by poor choices, but "everything" can literally be $10 USD of value; you can learn and move on from that sort of outcome.

(Sure, major trades generally happen off the blockchain, but public trades still serve as a benchmark for valuation. Back in the day, a BTC trade on the blockchain with a value of $50,000 USD would literally move the market worldwide, but those days are long gone.

Sure, there also are literally thousands of crypto "shitcoins" created, but avoiding those is pretty easy. Avoiding anything Helmuth-endorsed is a simple starting point.)

Finally, crypto, ETH specifically, can be used to directly purchase/sell real world goods and services without conversion to fiat. The genius of ETH, as the "gas" that powers virtually a trade in anything that can be reduced to a contract, was a huge leap forward for semi-private commerce. That utility and use case is what spooks some folks.

So what happens when it all gets regulated in 12 months