Let's just remember your original premise. Hold bitcoin, spend cash. If it's between holding cash or bitcoin, we'll see who is idiotic.

Since there are no fundamentals to base the price on, a chicken picking random figures from a hat is as good a predictor as any.
People going all in before garbage like NFTs go to 0 have probably made a lot of easy money but learned nothing.

Which smart people would these be?

Tooth release imminent any minute now.

The top signal had to be everyone and their mother bragging about how much money they were making trading and owning jpegs and some whale spending $69M on a jpeg.

No, the prediction was that we would hit 15k before 50k and he had that probability at 100%.

Anyone itt who has been around since 2020 would still be up 300-400% if they bought just 2 years ago. The bears only celebrate because they know they are still missing out

These are two great posts btw which are still sticking in my head. Maybe bitcoin does blow up under these conditions and goes to zero or a relative zero. Even though I have very reasonable bets down on bitcoin part of me also loves the adrenaline either way because the bets I've made I can afford to lose even if it goes to zero and I feel like I'm backing the side I believe in and under the current market conditions I think the cream rises to the top.

It's like watching Wallstreet 2, which wasn't a very good sequel btw, but Gordon Gecko still won under those market conditions. The days of easy winners are done. Let the cream rise to the top and let the true value show across all asset classes. If bitcoin is a dud then fine, let's go down with the ship but I'm done hiding behind some sort of mirage of money printing, etc. Gold will be forged from this type of market and the losers will die in it's wake.

Updating the model shortly

Another big down day and yet the market is up. Not good for crypto. I think crypto world is on very shaky ground right now. On the way down some big boys will be liquidated as well as shady exchanges etc pumping leverage/risk in to the market unwinding. A lot of gut check time for hodlers imo. On the bright side a little patience might get you a scorching hot deal on some ape merch

C'mon man. This is 2+2, home of the people who got ****ed by the UIGEA, which originated by the real scammers, corrupt politicians in government. The same government that punished basically no one for the global financial collapse...

I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers, or say we don't need regulated banks. I would just say that the concept of decentralizing power sounds pretty powerful, and technology is the pathway to molding that future...

Tech is changing rapidly and rapidly changing the world. Maybe some inventions just go out of style or obsolete? The future builds on the past's work, with or without the relics

Humans are greedy and egocentric. That's why we have governments and finance in the first place. To use our greed to benefit one another in a controlled way. But debasing the currency and ignoring the bills is corruption the banks have nothing to do with. They exist to make a profit and make the economy flow like any other business, amoral and forward looking...It's the power of government that is a problem. The concept of decentralizing power is an offered possible solution to human greed. I can see a future where banks in their current form function with, and better, in conjunction with concepts like BTC and ETH, et al. I can see a future where we don't need banks at all too, but I suppose that's more a question of how scarce resources remain

I agree completely. I just don't think crypto is the answer.

I hear 12 from people I trust, but pretty sure people just throw numbers at a dart board. Cascading liqs are big. Can drop hard and no one is buying until those leveraged or illiquid positions are flushed out. It's quite the ongoing attack. Macro is terrible.

I think I had 15k vs Tooth. Guess I leave thread if that happens. Can't remember what terms were.

I could see some quick wicks down, like 1 block. Yesterday ETH dropped to $975 for 1 block but bots immediately bought it back up to $1200. Tons of positions were liquidated. That could happen with BTC too. We'll see.

How could it possibly be anything other than this? I'd say the same for stocks as well. Just a bunch of people trying to sound smart.

Watching real time liquidation is pretty wild. This 3AC thing is nuts. Whole thread is interesting:

I'm a fan of Peter Schiff, I know he's a perma-bear and wrong as often as he's right, but I find him entertaining and often hilarious. On his most recent episode he has an epic BTC rant that is pretty funny, even if you are a crypto bull. Starts at about 35:40. I do agree with his point that CNBC has been shamelessly shilling for Bitcoin for several years now.

Well I guess you aren't being self-inconsistent but its kinda hard to parse your sentiments.

Computational hardness is a requirement to the block validation process as a key to address the problem of sybil attack. Obviously you don't mean to argue against this, right?

Its just strange to make a comparison where lightning is the final product and not part of the medium of exchange (process). Simply put if you created a lightning tx on paypal you are at the mercy of paypal which has the capability of reversing the transaction. If you create a ln tx on bitcoin you have the security against reversibility that bitcoin affords. Do you mean to argue that bitcoin isn't more secure than paypal in this context?

You added the descriptor 'insecure' with no qualification.

Do you think maybe getting the entire world on a single pricing system is the answer?

That's right, I'm not arguing against that. I'm arguing that building a currency system based on arbitrary computational difficulty is a bad design in of itself. It doesn't scale, in fact it has negative scaling based on the ever-escalating computing demands placed on the system from the escalating difficulty factor.

I'm not sure my point is being received. Once a Lightning channel is funded by BTC the security of those funds is determined by the Lightning protocol, not BTC. This is the weakest-link principle of security design.

That is a WAAAY different point than you appeared to be making. I would suggest that the early developers, current active devs, and well touted cypherpunks (notably nick szabo) believe that inscalability of the base layer was a necessary trade-off for security. Do you disagree? This DOES however limit the application/implementation, but its necessary, and then seemingly Satoshi believed it wasn't fatal in regard to its market valuation.

If all of a sudden the base layer is reversible then there is no hope for the 2nd layer to not be irreversible. Paypal is reversible, bitcoin base layer (I wonder if we agree) is not.

It was the same point I've been making but appears it wasn't received as such. The fact the system couldn't work without requiring inscalability is what makes it a bad design.

I agree. Again, once the funds are in the Lightning channel the user is afforded none of the protection that BTC provides. What good is guaranteeing your BTC is delivered to your Lightning account if you then have to rely on the inferior Lightning protocol to protect your funds?

Yeah I definitely remember Fulltiltpoker depositing $500 into people's account without debiting their credit cards just to boost the player pool with fake money. And pocketing actual deposited funds.

Full tilt pokers happen in decentralized / unregulated markets. Are regulated markets perfect? No. But they at least have an incentive to weed out fulltiltpoker actors.

I loved FTP by the way. That's where I grinded in the poker boom days.


Decentralized / unregulated power sounds pretty powerful, until you see the actual practice in reality.

Michael Saylor can send bitcoin prices down 50% if he decides to dump his entire bag.
People leave most of their money on exchanges (centralization) and exchanges are pulling the same dirt bag full tilt poker move by freezing withdrawals. Nobody has any clue how much money the exchanges actually hold in reserves. No audit, no regulation, who cares.
Garbage like algorithmic stable coins can be printed in thin air and traded on exchanges without much verification.
Stable coins like Tether don't want to show reserves because "secret sauce". And the last time they showed "Reserves" it was a bunch of line of credits.
Luna can collapse May 10, and 3 weeks later a totally new Luna 2 is printed and thrown onto the exchanges. No public audit because no regulation so who cares.
More garbage like HEX is out there to trap your coins in Richard Heart's pocket for 4 years while he does whatever he wants with it.


Majority of "builders" in crypto are there to make money. Amoral and forward looking.

I claim to be one of the most well read on this subject in a sense (but that includes Ideal Money), what I came to understand and explain, which is very complex and nuanced, is that bitcoin's inception only happened when it was realized that scaling (the inability to do so) is a necessary limitation. Isn't it interesting how precisely Szabo disagrees with you here:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/201...alability.html
Now szabo is just one person, and I invoke him as an authority, but aside from the fallacy I would ask if you intend on disagreeing with Szabo and the other current and relevant experts on this point?
I do not argue that bitcoin should and could become a world currency that every average joe/jane will be able to use. It will be too costly and is too limited imo-we might simply agree on this. So you mean to argue that lightning is insecure in some regard. Can you expand?

It's not complicated and doesn't need an expert name to decipher. A first-year CS student learning algorithms would suffice. And it certainly doesn't need psychobabble like what's in the link you shared. It's not a social issue - it's an engineering one. Pages and pages of text to justify bad design for "reasons" in the wrong domain.

Can you imagine if public-key cryptography was designed so that only seven people could log into all sites every second? That would require a congressional library of psychobabble to justify.

So to be clear. What Szabo carefully points out to as being Satoshi's genius insight , the thing that so many misunderstood for so many years (that precluded the security that has afforded bitcoin its value up until now), is exactly what you point out to be as Satoshi's stupidity that even a 1st CS student could see through? This you agree on right?

I've never seen people bow down and pray to an algorithm before, especially a bad one.

This. Bitcoin network being immune to manipulation and corruption means nothing in a system where everything else is manipulated and corrupted, including the price of bitcoin.

Also lol @ Saylor down over a billion “investing” in a greatest performing asset of all time. But being the cokehead scumbag he is, he probably secretly loaded up before shilling and dumped his personal stash while telling others to sell their house and buy btc. I’m sure Bukele did the same.