as long as zizek also admits that USD is a ponzi then I am fine with his point of view on crypto

Except he never dumped.

He does the same thing in Poker, professional troll/Skip Bayless clone. Bash people for VPN’ing and multi accounting in his poker related videos, while he encouraged people he stakes to VPN on random accounts to play poker around 2012-14. Do whatcha gotta do for teh views and $$$

Maybe. Maybe not. Even if he didn't sell, and even if everyone who knew he was releasing that video in advance didn't sell either, then it's still an example of the classic Pump and Hold.

Of course, the Pump and Hold with a bunch of independent, self-interested pumpers will almost certainly replicate a pump and dump with different winners.

with the way crypto is going we can expect more poker videos coiming

crypto is going up at the moment yasuo

Still very much a bear market overall

answer please.

1trillion USD in 1991 and today there is over 4trillion USD in circulation. The FED just prints money and adds it to the economy. But who starts with the money? The private owners of the Federal Reserve. The Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, etc. It's insane.

Basically the Federal Reserve creates money by adding 1s and 0s to its member bank account and the member bank owes the federal reserve. They buy treasury bonds with newly created money in Open Market Operations.

You would be an idiot to hold onto USD for the long term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_...e_central_bank

And the FDIC can only insure less than 1% of deposits. The USD is the biggest bubble in the history of mankind! King Crypto will save us!!!

Like I said, I don't really care to derail the thread with broader criticisms of crypto, and I assumed it/your post were troll posts anyway but if you insist:

Cryptocurrency is a fine idea. The reality is that the execution has drifted very far from the vision, and that vision may never become a reality. Bitcoin was meant to be decentralized, yet has demonstrably fallen under the control of a small number of actors and possibly even a single actor. Also, because Bitcoin is actively hoarded and lost at a rate much faster than it's being mined, it's highly deflationary and spending it (much less lending it) is highly discouraged. This makes it an exceptionally poor store of value.

In any case, I'm not an economist. I don't care to theorize about how crypto could ever fix the problem of not behaving like a currency. I don't care that people use it to launder money or buy illegal ****. I also don't care that the crypto ecosystem suffers from countless hacks and scams.

My argument is that since cryptocurrency is zero sum (there are no profits generated through economic activity), making a profit in fiat requires you to unload your bags onto someone else, a cycle that eventually collapses. While not exactly a textbook Ponzi, it is structurally similar and similarly doomed. Since market manipulators are presumably competent and self-interested, you can assume that price movements will benefit them, which in a zero sum environment necessitates overall losses for individual investors.

Obviously, none of that is characteristic of USD. Inflation discourages hoarding of USD, and despite the recession, it has a track record of decades-long stability and has real value to pay for countless goods and services, debts, and taxes. There are plenty of things you can argue about fiscal policy, but USD behaving as a Ponzi is not one of them. And if you want to argue about fiscal policy, it's probably better to do it somewhere else and with someone who isn't me.

Anyway, it's certainly bizarre seeing a poker player touting a -EV game as an "investment". And since every major crypto is absurdly correlated to Bitcoin, I doubt there's any way you could construct a crypto portfolio that changes that fact. Doug is essentially leading people who trust him as an intelligent authority to financial slaughter.

300% inflation over 30 years? They are printing money at an absurd rate....you really don't know what you are talking about do you?

Stellar Lumens 1% inflation per year. Like you said it prevents hoarding. They aren't diamonds. I've looked into the technical aspects and maybe I'm wrong, but I'm betting on Stellar Lumens.

All fiat currencies are ultimately a bubble, the USD included. The USD is a huge bubble and much more dangerous than crypto. I got my money on the USD bursting before crypto does....

As a very loose and undefined guideline, Doug has a lot of say as to what is allowed (or not allowed) in this thread. Any judgment on thread derails is largely left up to Doug.

Since you're an astute, well-researched investor I assume you know that the inflation built into Lumens is a hoarding incentive, as voting power is tied to wallet size and inflation pools pay in proportion to voting power. Here's a free tip, if you're so hellbent on real world use cases, you should stop focusing on the criteria that don't really matter compared to fiat (speed, transaction cost) and focus on the only one that does, privacy. It's the only reason anyone cares to jump through all these hoops and costs to do real things.

Verge: Hackers keep robbing cryptocurrency YouTubers

Some various points here

1) I bought BTC for the first time in 2013. So I've been lucky to make a good portion of money from crypto. I did not just buy and hold however, I sold as price increased to keep my portfolio diversified amongst asset classes (What can I say I guess im a nit)

2) Cryptocurrency has value because people say it does. Personally I think its better than Fiat for a variety of reasons including

- Deflationary (at least some are, including Bitcoin)
- Increased liquidity by being completely digital
- Ruled by algorithims instead of people
- Popular with younger generations who understand the idea of digital money.

However, it is also extremely speculative and volatile.

It is not a ponzi scheme, because the buying of bitcoin is not based around fraudulent information or guarantees.

In general I think people freak out too much about what is happening right now, and everyone has their own greater view on the subject. But at the end of the day, it is a brand new asset class with a lot of upside. There is some chance we will see a far greater adoption than we see today (that chance is debatable), and in those scenarios the value of your portfolio will increase tremendously.

I do not see a good counter argument to having at least 5-10% of your net worth in cryptocurrency.

Crypto is not an asset class because it has no intrinsic value and is backed by nothing. People claim the same is true for the USD but that is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, which includes a $20T/year GDP, Federal taxing authority, the 2nd most resource-rich nation in the world, and a military to enforce its agreements and debts. And people talk about how gold or crypto is a hedge - good luck trying to use that hedge if the world ever becomes the scary place they first envisioned the need for that hedge.

Do you support on-chain governance?

Because governance is still very much ruled by people.

Can't believe people care about not completing the bankroll challenge...

Central banks such as The Federal Reserve, The Deutsche Bundesbank and The Bank of England etc, print extra money to lend to people, those people then use the money to create assets or commodities or to fund a service of some kind. E.g. build a house, grow some crops, design software, buy a ladder to become a window cleaner. The extra money in the economy then becomes fairly closely matched by the increase in the total assets in the economy, and even when it isn't completely matched by assets, it still serves the purpose of allowing what is effectively a totally flexible barter system within the economy.

Most central banks act responsibly when increasing the money supply and do so for the reasons above and are careful to use the control of interest rates to avoid high inflation.

So fiat money is purely a tool to make the barter system of goods and services totally flexible, because when you break it down we are still bartering.

The issue with Crypto is that it is almost infinitely inflationary because of the apparent ease at which new coins can be invented. Yes some individual existing coins have a finite number in issue or a projected finite amount. But there is nothing stopping anyone inventing new coins which do a very similar thing to existing coins and there is no central bank behind each coin that has a panel appointed by a government who then act economically responsibly when determining how much more money (coins) to release into the economy.

So most Crypto coins currently are a false market because a very high percentage of them are being held by investors but not spent on (bartered with) for goods and services, unlike fiat currency which has an audit trail history to it whereby money was either earned by the individual who now has it, or it was borrowed by the individual from a bank in order to ultimately create a real value of assets to match it.

In other words, fiat currency doesn't even need assets to back it up (although some banks do have gold stored to back it up), it is backed by the audit trail of real barter activity that it was used for.

The concept of Crypto currency is therefore currently fundamentally flawed, because only a tiny percentage of coins are in real use in the barter system, so each Crypto currency is only making a minimal contribution to increasing the total real assets in the economy, e.g. new houses built or new lands farmed.

One can argue that greater adoption of Crypto by wholesalers, retailers and service providers may change this, but I have my doubts because of the proliferation of more brand new coins and because the general public (not poker players or cool kids under 30) actually like the certainty of central banks, governments and large private institutions backing their currency, guaranteeing its worth and responsibly controlling the money supply.

cant believe someone is trying to defend fiat

What do you mean, "trying".

The total market money supply in Crypto is not responsibly controlled and only a tiny percentage of coins are currently in real usage for goods or services.

These are undeniable facts.

Additionally, something like Bitcoin can only be a "store of value" if it is backed (underpinned) by a fiat currency, or by bonds, or by a physical asset or similar, which it is not.

So until it has one of the above, or gets into mass real life usage thus "creating" additional real assets in the economy, its *real* value is very close to zero.

IMO it is a race against time for all Crypto currencies to get adopted properly into the mainstream economy, and to hope that there aren't too many competitor coins invented whilst they are doing this.

It is all very dicey IMO and the recent fall in Crypto prices is most likely as a result of the overall inflationary pressure on the market as a whole that new coins being invented is causing.

If you buy any coin you are essentially punting on the speed and scope of its adoption into the mainstream and praying that some other coin that is just as good or better doesn't suddenly appear as a new one in the market.

fiat is still a scam regardless of your stance on crypto

flirting dangerously with it already, but we're getting very close to the point in the natural trajectory of any online crypto/altcoin discussion where the thread devolves into a bunch of sci-fi larpers and "libertarians" spewing full blown anti-semitic globalist/masonic conspiracy theories

Cryptocurrencies are made by flat lizard people to cover up the fake oceans and control our species.

People are willing to buy a lot of pointless things if they think they can make more money. It's a way to gamble without going to a casino. Beanie Babies also had value because other people said they have value. Is that enough?

The point of having the Fed regulating the money supply is to ease out the natural economic cycles. It is why we are not on the gold standard any more. The dollar has flexibility. No currency should be strictly deflationary or inflationary. Most economists would probably agree that a gently inflationary currency is far superior for the general economic good.

Liquidity is a great sales point for crypto. Sometimes this gets confused with anonymity (which is a non starter). But crypto has a long way to go. It is neither liquid or stable. Before people start caring about liquidity, we need to have stability first. If we have a stable and liquid crypto, it also means there will not be a way to make much money in crypto and all the marketing shills disappear. (Just as we don't have youtube shills telling us to buy Dollars or Euros.)

Algorithims don't govern anything. Coins are hard/soft forked into something else all the time. This might seem great until we look at values and incentives of those trying to create consensus. The Fed's mandate is to drive "maximum sustainable employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates". What is a coin's owner's incentive? It most certainly has little to do with greater good for the economy. One of the bright spots for crypto is Venezuela - a governing disaster is great for crypto but what good is one's crypto if one lives in Venezuela... it's still a life fail.

Do young people understand crypto? IMO, no. People parrot what they hear. I have not heard the word "fiat" outside the finance circles for many years until the crypto shills came along trying to scratch their gambling habits. Young people are willing to accept digital payments and try a lot of things if the marketing dollars are behind something. They will grow out of it?

Just because there might be some blockchain applications in business doesn't mean that a coin has potential for big gains.

If crypto is actually used as currency, it will be stable and liquid - hardly a way to make money. No one buys dollars or euros hoping to strike it rich, they never did and never have because it goes against the very idea of what a currency is.

Actually, people regularly trade FX for profit.

. . .