You seemed to have been speculating that bitfinex was ONLY recently recovering from their 2016 "hack," and I just wanted to provide some details that suggests that their recovery may have been quite quick from the 2016 "hackening" situation.

Sure, I don't have too many ideas regarding the extent to which bitfinex's finances and even their recovery from the 2016 hack may have been smoke and mirrors, but I do recall the level of doom and gloom in the bitcoin space in August through about October 2016 was largely attributable to the bitfinex hack. 

I recall the surprise in the bitcoin space regarding the quickness in which they paid back those BFX tokens, when all the BFX tokens were reclaimed as of April 1, 2017.. Yep.. surprise surprise, and likely bitfinex worked that situation to their advantage in order to profit from the hack... but whatever... those are the kinds of things that happen in the wild, wild west.. 

I also recall that there has been a whole hell of a lot of FUD spreading in the bitcoin space in connection with bitfinex's ongoing connection and practices regarding tether... and that FUD spreading regarding tether has had stronger periods, but it has been largely ongoing since the inception of tether, and the issuance of tether coins which I think was around late 2014.

Probably part of my point is that frequently the bitfinex situation seems to be overstated from my perspective, even though I don't really proclaim to have any information that differs greatly from anyone else, but when it appears to me that important facts are neither being disclosed, being downplayed or they seem to be twisted in directions that come off as illogical or unreasonable, then I might become motivated to clarify my perspective, which is what I was attempting to do in my earlier post.

Regarding speculation, sure, speculate about whatever you want, and hopefully you are able to adapt your speculation to facts and logic, too, if you are able to find out about more accurate facts or more reasonable logic, then it is good to adapt... pie in the sky speculation or speculating based on wishful facts, can come off as a bit annoying, especially if other more plausible facts and explanations are apparent. 

I understand that frequently folks are going to differ regarding what facts are relevant and material and also regarding what kinds of inferences are reasonably drawn from such facts.  So there is that.

By the way, I largely accept the theory that fillippone presented in his earlier post about bitfinex likely being involved in some of the current behind the scenes shenanigans, even though of course, there is quite a bit of speculation in that, too, and in my earlier post, I was largely just attempting to clarify the inferences and connections that you, deisik, seemed to have been drawing from the 2016 purported "hackening."

I was attempting to razz you a little bit with strong language, and surely, you do seem to be less in an accumulation stage, so surely there can seem to be contradictions in an approach that has gotten past the early accumulation stages, which you probably did most of that many years ago... .. and even I have largely been in a maintenance stage since about 2017, even though there may be some times that I accumulate or inject a bit more value, too... and also there are times that involve liquidation, too, and it is not exactly fitting into a description of a system that is weighted in any specific direction.. , but instead a combination of factors.. that should be accounted for differently from someone who still had not reached his/her target BTC accumulation levels.



Sounds like a crude and real world description of Gresham's law combined with reallocation motivations.



Fair enough.  If all of a sudden, some very large and unanticipated expense rolled into your door.. you might have to say fuck.  And, you might have liquidate a decently large portion of your bitcoin's even though it was either last or towards the end of you liquidation list.

Nice for us to have those kinds of options, even though they do not necessarily resolve all issues that might end up coming in our direction.. including some major issues that could undermine our bitcoin stash, too..

Largely makes sense to me... a kind of reverse DCA withdrawing that might also involve some attempts at reallocating away from bitcoin that causes you retrospectively to tentatively conclude that over the years (and maybe even continuing to date) you may have been withdrawing from BTC at a bit higher levels than what others would do, but overall you have a decent amount of BTC, so it is not like you are likely to run out soon or NOT have any, even if BTC prices go shooting up.

No problem with any of that, especially if you are overall comfortable with it, and may even decide to tweak your strategy at some point (if you get around to it)... hahahahaha



Maybe in the end, if you are both buying and selling BTC, in the end, you are NOT really doing anything much different than any other longer term BTC HODLer, even if your description is a bit different.. but in the end, there might not be a large material difference because you are both skimming off from time to time and buying from time to time and some of that might coincide with where the BTC price is at and other times it merely coincides with if you have dollar needs or not.


You are a stubborn one, so probably some of your following of Gresham's law happens to be more subliminal rather than your lame attempts at equality.... hahahahaha    (hate to say that you were starting to sound a wee bit like searing for a while, there... with your seemingly both loving and hating of bitcoin at the same time.    )

Corona could give less than two shits whether republican or democrat.... and our lil buddy, aka bitcoin, feels the same way about partisan baloney... 

Furthermore every fucking state has been engaging in various piss poor efforts at shutting down and/or targeted strategies, so it is going to take a decently long time to compile information and sort the wheat from the chafe in terms of figuring out what has been going on and what has been effective, with also some elements of chance and unknowns mixed in the data and the assessment of the data, too.

If you recall, the bitfinex proclaimed that the users were going to absorb the hack, which was both socializing the losses in the form of a loan that caused bitfinex to convert the value of all of the users holdings to a dollar value, and thereafter shaving 36% off of the value of each of the user accounts while issuing a loan coin that it paid back all of it by April 1, 2017, which would have been 8 months from the time of the hack.

Furthermore, the issued coin traded at just a fraction of its issuance value, which likely caused bitfinex the ability to buy back those issued coins for pennies on the dollar, and also, the increase in the BTC price and also other coins likely caused additional abilities of Bitfinex to recoup losses of those coins... by the way I believe that it was around 120k BTC... but whatever, in that ballpark of coins.

There are all kinds of systems in place that are constantly trying to both figure out applicable law and even disputing about applicable law.


There are also all kinds of systems that try to avoid getting tangled in disputes because some value is given to going along and getting along, and leaving the battles to others.

Just because you might consider yourself in one category, you likely should appreciate that there are a variety of perspectives, and frequently individuals will change their perception of their situation or even their involvement in battles and whether they believe that they or their circumstances warrant their involvement.



You are good at creating strawman arguments and then winning such arguments.

Congratulations on your Pyrrhic victory.



Surely, you are passionate about this made-up meandering venture, and hopefully, you realize that there are all kinds of laws and disputes, and only a small fraction of them end up either raising constitutional questions or constitutional amendment questions, so go on, argue your abstract whole-cloth fabricated nonsense with ur lil selfie.      

 

Are you suggesting that sometimes you will try to follow Gresham's law, vapourminer, meaning that you speculate that bitcoin is the more sound of the monies, and you tend to consider whether to sell other kinds of monies / assets before selling any of your bitcoin?

I understand that if you are already more appreciated in bitcoin, and bitcoin ends up comprising way more of the value of your various assets, then you might end up shaving off some bitcoin rather than selling some of the less valuable monies/assets, because largely you are somewhat over-allocated in bitcoin relative to the other assets/monies because bitcoin has gone way up in its value compared with the other assets.

I believe that a decent number of longer term bitcoin HODLers might be perceived as potentially NOT following Gresham's law because they do not really mind selling some of their BTC here and there along the way, and likely an explanation for that willingness to sell some of their BTC, even though it is the more valuable asset/money has to do with the value of their BTC holdings relative to the value of their other assets being way disproportionately high, mostly because of BTC's ongoing great appreciation in value (when we zoom out long enough).


Hahahahaha

You feeling crowded out.

Infringed upon?

Too many words to read?

Stressful?

Pobrecito.  


I could consider "working on" my "issue".......






considering ... considering... considering....














conclusion:  probably not.


 

I have never parachuted, but I heard that there are two parachutes, which seems like a good idea, and probably a tactic that should be practiced in real life dangerous situations, too.

If you are considering that HODLers are less likely to get stressed out about paper losses when they are not really calculating how much "hypothetically" had been lost because of some "hypothetical" time that they could have sold at a higher price, then I suppose that makes sense in terms of causing a more sound psychological framework.

And, I supposed another angle could be considering:  "I am still in profits"   or "the loss could be worse"

Probably, there is going to continue to be certain degree of nervousness, but at some point, either the HODLer has shaved off some of the BTC profits and maybe put such profits in other assets that do not seem to be very closely correlated to BTC's price movements or the perception of the amount of the investment is so low that even something like a 85% price correction is NOT detrimental.

So, let's say for example, a BTC HODLer had invested 10% of his/her quasi investment assets into bitcoin in 2014/15 so total investment portfolio is $100k.  $10k in bitcoin (average price of $750/BTC - 13.3333BTC), $20k in various property interests, $10k in bonds, $10k in annuities, and $50k in equities.   

Between 2016 and 2017, the value of the whole portfolio goes to $379k by the middle of December 2017, yet that appreciation in value mostly came from BTC price appreciation to $262k (BTC prices of $19,666) while the remainder of the portfolio only appreciated to $117k  (** note for argument simplicity sake, I am giving lots of benefit of the doubt to other (traditional) investments to be generally holding constant or appreciating in value.. and I am also presuming that the quantity of BTC held has remained constant through these various possibly stressful periods)

When in late 2018, BTC plummeted 85% (BTC prices of $3,124) and arguably the other investments held constant, so the total value of the investment portfolio became $159k by the middle of December 2017, yet that decline in value mostly came from BTC price depreciation to $42k while the remainder of the portfolio stayed largely constant at $117k 

Surely, we might feel better on the day of the BTC halvening when BTC prices were up to $10k, but then plummeted down to nearly $8k, but even with $8k price evaluations for our BTC holdings, our total holdings would have been $224k with BTC value of $107k and traditional assets at $117k.

So, yes, if we HODL through these many volatile situations and try NOT to think about the possible negative situation (on paper) for too much time, then we should recognize that over time our overall investment portfolio is going up with the passage of time, and largely because our BTC investment continues, overall, to out perform various other aspects of our portfolio.

Must be noted that even with this hypothetical (which kind of reflects some of my own percentages), the stressful day of March 12 would have brought our BTC value to the similar valuation that it had been in the lows of late 2018, even if that valuation of sub $4ks and staying in the $4ks for BTC only persisted for a few days, and BTC HODLers could not have been sure about whether such BTC price corrections were going to continue and to cause more stresses.

Even though I am largely HODLing through these kinds of dramatic BTC price movements through the years, I am suggesting that I still get a bit nervous by them, even though BTC HODLing seems to have been amongst the best of portfolio management strategies because engaging in large sales of BTC or anything like that in order to attempt to time the BTC price movements may have caused even more difficulties and stresses unless there had happened to have been some luck involved in being able to lock in some additional profits from those kinds of selling higher and buying back lower kinds of plays.

Those kinds of original intention argument frameworks are frequently used to perpetuate superficial and nonsensical generalizations, and nobody's got time for dat.


I do have a point, which is frequently it is better to work from where you are at, rather than trying to start over from some idealized starting point, which is the nonsense that you seem to be spouting.



Hm?  for some reason you have a knack for identifying twats, now?  

You would be hilarious if you weren't so often engaging in disingenuine arguments.  


I don't want to "imagine."  Makes me feel disconnected.   

I believe that I kind of understand what you are saying, and surely it helps NOT to overinvest into bitcoin in order to feel less nervous when the price drops 85%.

I felt nervous at several points while BTC was dropping between $19,666 and $3,124, which would include that final drop in November 2018 from about $6k to $3,124.

I also felt nervous when BTC dropped from around $7,300 to $3,850 in less than one day on March 12, 2020.

Of course, further back in history I was nervous too, when BTC dropped from $1,163 to $158 between December 2013 and January 2015, but I also felt nervous when it did not seem like it wanted to go up in price throughout most of 2015.

So, I am not sure about the trick exactly in terms of NOT feeling nervous, even after a greater profit cushion seems to exist, there seems to be abilities for the BTC price to move outrageously in the downward direction, and even if I am feeling like I am getting somewhat less nervous than several other forum members, and I usually have some plan to buy BTC (even though maybe my level of nervousness might have to do with my perceptions that I am getting close to running out of money to continue to buy BTC when the BTC price is going down.

o.k... o.k... maybe I am exaggerating regarding the level of my nervousness, because so far HODLing when in the state of most nervous (assuming getting close to running out of money) has tended to work out pretty well.

I might need some pointers, regarding:

"how to NOT become too nervous during times in which the BTC price is going down - like it's falling off a cliff, and when I am assessing myself to be running out of money to buy more?"

These might be our last hours in which we can get coins in the 4 digits...


Perhaps?

Ask Elwar how it worked out for him?

Elwar sold his house right around the time of the 2016 halvening, so in a similar situation 4 years earlier.

He was also underwater for a few months after he bought bitcoin with his house proceeds for several months, and a lot of people referred to him as gambling a bit too much... but we know what happened in late 2016, so he would have broken even and started to be in profits by the end of the year, and 2017 was even better.

Yeah, personally, I would have had problems allocating so much into bitcoin, and especially in a lump sum like that, so surely each person should be weighing how the rest of his finances are doing, and be prepared for the BTC price to either go down and just make sure that living expenses and emergency funds are covered.. but sure in Elwar's case, it seemed to have worked out pretty decently, and we have heard of some other folks who invested like that during an exponential BTC price growth period and did not work out so well for them, but would have likely worked out o.k. if they would have been able to hold their position for more than 4 years.


No need to ask Elwar.

He will tell you, voluntarily.   

GTFOH jbreher...

You want to attempt to be consistent?  by bringing some kind of lame ass original intent interpretation to the constitution just like you act like you are doing with BTC's white paper?  

Your ideas about "original intent" are looney, nonsensical and failure/refusal to account for human application in either situation... 
 aka consensus.. ever heard about consensus, compromise, applying theory to fact... etc etc rather than lame ass attempts to impose your theoretical bullshit on others?    

Aren't you saying that anyone who is serious about bitcoin, should be preparing for either price direction, and not overly preparing for one direction instead of the other.

On the other hand, maybe one of the things that irritates me about down betters is that anyone who is investing into bitcoin and somewhat understanding its fundamentals, should already be attempting to stack a bit more in terms of their bet to the upside rather than betting to the downside; otherwise why invest in bitcoin?

In the end, if any one who wants to build his/her BTC stack is attempting to build it by selling and hoping to buy back lower, then that just seems like a strange ass approach to the whole matter, but hey, to each his own.  Do as you please, and maybe you will get lucky, perhaps?  Seen a lot of people get reckt waiting for lower prices when they should instead be getting busy towards some kind of more simple version of just steadily stacking.

Of course, there has already been a lot of discussion that the hype cycle was intentionally designed into bitcoin's 4-year halvening cycle.... which includes front-loading the mining-generated issuance of coins.

Organic growth, spam attack, or some processing deficiencies?

There have been some arguments, recently, for some kind of preference for the growth of a fee driven model, and this could be part of a movement in that direction (that seems to be preferred by some peeps).

Makes it more difficult to consolidate a bunch of small utxos, but how much (nearly free) consolidatings do people need to be doing?

Weren't you one of those Covid deniers?

Would be nice if you could get tested.

There still seems to be a lot of denial in a lot of places, including the fact that there is a lot of failure and refusal to conduct tests and seemingly even to obscure information regarding what is going on with this because there are a lot of desires for a lot of people to continue to work even if they are putting themselves at risk because the economy and the supply chains are continuing to take a beating...

Still seems to me that the whole situation would be better dealt with in terms of continued push for testing, even if testing is going to cost a lot in terms of getting the test together and also following the logic of quarantining the folks who end up turning up positive until the virus runs its course, hopefully avoiding hospitalization.. that would be great, but not always possible to avoid hospitalization, either because there is a decent amount of variance in regards to how individuals react differently.

Get some rest, and of course, this message is meant for the public, not just in response to you specifically, even though I understand that people might have some changes in their perspective if they actually go through Covid themselves and/or if they have people close to them who are going through covid, having permanent damage or even dying from it... no shortage in deaths, even though some people want to down play the death component, too... as if it were no BIG deal.. and of course, it might be no big deal until people around you start collapsing.


We cannot know if the virus has cleared away until tests are done and the death rate starts to drop.

As far as I can see the death rate seems to be going up (and even if the death rate is flat, it does not take very many cases, to cause multiplier effects that might not be felt until later down the road), so the information on deaths and who is infected and who is still contagious is not exactly clear, still, so still seems that we are in early days of still making many more cases of infection and deaths..and we don't even know if herd immunity is going to work once we might start reaching levels in which herd immunity might become quasi-feasible.

I doubt that any of this desire for information is fearmongering, but instead, trying to deal with reality rather than just framing the matter as everything is going to be fine... which could take a few years to work out.. and hopefully many of us will be able to live through it.. not sure about that yet, because still early days. 

Of course, a lot of places are trying to open up, but how can anyone consider all of that playing out very well if tests are still not very widely available and there continues to be a lot of secretes about the information including governments that should have obligations to gather, compile and to make information available and NOT to be obscuring information or mischaracterizing what is actually going on.

Not very easy to acquire 10 BTC these days, even though back in 2015 10BTC seemed like such a modest target.

Can you imagine?

10 BTC for around $2,500.... truely reachable for a lot of regular peeps... even if they would have had too spend the whole of 2015 stacking sats at $10 per week, they would have achieved (and perhaps exceeded) 10BTC by the end year.

Even though it may be a bit difficult to get 10BTC currently, the strategy for any beginner into BTC should still be something similar to what it was in 2015, and maybe $5 per week or maybe if you can afford it, $100 to $200 per week could work also, and maybe it could take a few years to get to 10BTC.. perhaps?   And, maybe some people will not be able to reach 10BTC, even if they started aggressively today.

Part of the issue should also be to continue to recommend NOT to overdo the investment plan.  Figure out an amount that works, and just start to accumulate, even if it only is $5 per week.  Also, lump summing can be o.k. too.. if you have some savings already then maybe you lump sum in with a decent amount and then supplement that lump sum amount with a DCA plan that is subsequently reasonable and just keeps stacking the sats, even if 10BTC might be difficult to achieve, getting to 1BTC might well end up being sufficient in 5, 10 or 20 years, so in stead of being a sat billionaire, you only reach sat 100million status.. just do whatever you can without over extending yourself..   You will thank hairy, later.   

This is how I feel about your comment in regards to my earlier comment:

Bitcoin price movements can surely test the patience of any HODLer/accumulator, and of course the traders are trying to take advantage of as much of the volatility as they can, and frequently we will find BTC defying the expectations of the squiggly lines on the charts.

Even thinking back to April-June 2019, the BTC price movement from $4,200 to $13,880 caused a lot of HODLers to speculate that BTC was on its way up, and surely in retrospect there can be all kinds of speculation regarding why the continued BTC upwards movement did not happen, why the movement was ahead of its time, or why we are in a purported bear market currently, and whether or NOT any of us buys some of those analytical angles in terms of describing BTC price history (that we can all see in front of us), it is even more difficult to describe while we are in it.  

So, sometimes even the most lame of BTC price predictors can proclaim in retrospect that a 3.5x BTC price appreciation in about 3 months is overheated; however, before such price movement happened, there probably would have been close to zero chart-a-lists who might have anticipated such outrageous BTC price movement, and probably even some traders have learned from experience to prepare for such outrageous scenarios which disproportionately benefits HODLers who did not sell too much too soon and did not end up betting against the corn while in the midst of that movement.  Surely once it reached its top, then it would have become profitable to bet against bitcoin at that point, and could have paid off handsomely in the past almost year (even though my personal strategy does not involve any of the betting against corn, tactics).    

My personal investment system strives NOT to really call short term BTC price directions, but to both attempt to profit from the volatility, let the price come to me, and to anticipate that in the longer term the BTC price is going to continue to be higher.. including that so far in BTC's history, the BTC price has always been higher 4 years after any earlier price point, and there is likely going to be some time in the future in which that framing of BTC price dynamics is NOT going to be true (including wondering whether December 2021 is going to deliver BTC prices that are higher than $19,666 or not?  still to be determined).

Anyhow, so far, BTC price dynamics have sufficiently trended up in order to ensure that so long as at least any BTC accumulator/HODLer has had at least a 4 year time horizon, even if such person has bought at the top of any such BTC price movement, the price is likely to be higher 4 years later.. even while in the middle of that 4 year period, there may be several times in which the BTC buyer/hodler had wished to have had saved a bit more fiat to have been able to buy more BTC at lower prices in the up and down cyclings.

So, for example, if a BTC accumulating person had $2,000 to invest in bitcoin, that person might be a bit upset for a while if s/he had bought .11111BTC at $18k in December 2017, when the same amount of cash could have been used to buy .5 BTC at $4k in December 2018 (1 year later) or even in March 2020 (almost 2.5 years later).

Personally, even though I keep track of my input costs into BTC, when I had been in my most intensive BTC accumulation stages in 2014 and 2015, I had just continued to accumulate BTC on a regular basis and tried NOT to think too much about where the BTC price might go during that period in which I was building my target BTC accumulation levels.  So there are many times that I could look back and second guess my strategy and verify that I could have accumulated way more than twice as much BTC with the same amount of fiat capital that I had employed into BTC, but I still find that second-guessing to be almost useless because if I continue to invest in bitcoin whether it goes up or down, I still have given myself upwards price movement insurance.  In other words, while in the midst of the BTC price movement, we cannot really know how much more time we are going to be spending at x, y, or z price levels or if those BTC buying levels are going to end up disappearing.

I have seen a lot of folks making way BIGGER mistakes than me by waiting or NOT acting, because they are either failing to continue to invest in BTC, and they are waiting for lower BTC prices before taking action.  

So, any of us might consider if we have goals to accumulate a certain quantity of BTC and we have not reached our BTC accumulation goals yet, then it is much better to just act on a regular basis, even if we can only afford $20 per week or some modest amount that we feel comfortable putting into bitcoin, it will still add up over time, and sometimes keeping a bit of extra fiat to buy on dips, can be helpful too, during our BTC accumulation phases.

So another hypothetical, maybe we could afford $20 per week to put into BTC, but we want to prepare ourselves for BTC price dips, too, so instead we decide to inject $15 per week into BTC and to just save the $5 per week in order to be prepared for buying more on dips.  I know that these numbers might sound small, and I am using small numbers to demonstrate that each of us needs to be reasonable in terms of making sure that we are working within our budget, but also that almost anyone can establish some kind of plan that is going to add up to be a lot of BTC in the future as long as the timeline is long enough, and it frequently takes 30 years or more for someone to build their retirement portfolio, but I bet with BTC there are decent chances that the quantity of time could end up being considerably reduced.

So even with $20 per week over the past 7 years, the BTC accumulator with a dollar cost averaging (DCA) approach would have accumulated nearly 14 BTC by now, and even if it might be a lot more difficult to accumulate that quantity of BTC, there is still likely to continue to be decent ongoing BTC price performance in the coming years.

Seems that at some point, we might no longer be able to obtain BTC in the 4 digits realm, and that could happen within weeks or maybe it takes a couple more years before we clear out of the 4 digits realm completely, but the person who DCAs into BTC should not really care so much either way, as long as s/he has a long enough investment time horizon, it will likely continue to work out as long as s/he also figures out safe ways to store the accumulated BTC, too.