Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Checkmaker
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.