the easiest way to monitor the real estate market is to look at large cap real estate investment trusts (REIT)---companies that own, run, or finance investment properties.

these are the top REITs by market cap in the american market:
https://www.fool.com/millionacres/real-estate-investing/reits/10-largest-reits-market-cap-2020/

these are the top ones in the UK market:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/325371/uk-lse-reits-ranked/

all the listed companies should be available on tradingview since they are traded on the major stock exchanges.

for short term hedging against crypto market volatility. that's why there is $3 billion in stablecoins sitting on exchanges. https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1250979847536590849

those stablecoin holders obviously don't want dollars in their bank account. it's mostly dry powder waiting to buy back into bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

one of the narratives explaining quickly growing stablecoin supplies is their rising popularity for cross-border remittance, especially in china. bitcoin bear markets and general market uncertainty have made stablecoins attractive for some. https://www.coindesk.com/tether-usdt-russia-china-importers

i can't find any news articles about this. link?

based on how optimistic the market is about recovery, i find it unlikely that anyone would be destroying oil stores yet. i could only see that if this keeps up for months or years. oil contracts might go negative again at expiration, but longer term i think countries like china (who are huge oil importers) are building facilities to suck up the excess supply. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/oil-prices-china-imports/index.html


+1.

most people opt for a reputable exchange like bitstamp or coinbase pro. unfortunately, exchanges rarely allow paypal for buying BTC. i was about to recommend paybis.com but i see they've recently removed the options for paypal.

if you can find paypal offers on p2p marketplaces (localbitcoins, paxful, this forum) you'll probably pay a big mark-up over exchange prices. if your partner can withdraw the paypal balance to his bank account, he can deposit to an exchange and pay normal prices. that's probably the best way to go.


bitcoins can't be taken back once payment is confirmed. the same is not true for paypal---that's the issue.

i remember it quite well actually. "without any drops"? on the contrary:

june 2016 high: $779
halving: july 9 2016
august 2016 low: $465

= 40.3% drop. https://bitcoinwisdom.io/markets/bitstamp/btcusd

for sure. the USA is the biggest oil producer in the world, and they also have some of the most expensive per barrel costs---and prices are now back to 1990s levels.


there is increasing talk about a cold war with china: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/coronavirus-pandemic-us-china-new-cold-war

i'm not reading too much into it yet.

thanks for the heads up. i'm not sure i'll wake up in time but if i do, i'll be donk shoving. too many runners to take it seriously.


yeah i wouldn't want to kick out players like ceehe!

this isn't like a freeroll. there isn't much incentive for outsiders to infiltrate it since they'd have to go through the whole series and pay all the additional buy-ins. i don't think we need a rule about it.

i don't get it. why?

consumer confidence is making record setting declines. with less people working and spending money, the law of supply and demand says prices should drop.


some large cities are still completely locked down, especially along the border of russia. the consensus is that the official statistics are bogus.

it's a matter of perspective. a lot of people would say the time already came for small miners years ago, with the advent of ASICs or the 2016 halving. i know people who used to mine bitcoins with GPU and FPGA at home. they wouldn't go anywhere near home mining now.

the halvings will continue magnifying the effect of economies of scale. large scale miners will have superior cost advantages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

there was a lot of fearmongering about miner shutdowns after the 2016 halving but it never had a significant effect on hash rate. miners generally plan for the long term and have no doubt prepared for this halving just the same.

i like your optimism but physical distancing is probably gonna be with us for a long time (years) since there is so little hope of herd immunity without a vaccine.

south korean government scientists believe the pandemic could be with us for 2 years. they laid out a 2-year plan outlining life under the coronavirus pandemic:
https://twitter.com/ReutersJapan/status/1254930830822121473

continued distancing, temperature checks and disinfection in public, travel quarantines, promotion of teleworking, restrictions on retail etc.

we could see face masks sticking around for a while. people in east asian countries continued wearing masks for a long time after SARS due to the fear around it.

in 2016, it sorta was priced in. the market dumped pretty hard right around the halving, then kept dumping for a month afterwards. something like a 40% drop all told.

my take is the halving as an event can be priced in, just like that. but the long term supply effects that will be felt over the coming years---that can't be effectively priced in this early. in that way, a lot of us are talking about two different things.

looking at the blind structure, i really don't think it would make that much difference in the later stages. maybe we can try the first couple games in the series at 5k and see if it actually runs much longer?

there seems to be some interest in the idea.

stagflation, deflation, hyperinflation, strong recovery..... each scenario has plenty of people betting on it.

i'm happy to be sitting on both bitcoins and cash. i have no idea what's gonna happen over the next while. the comparisons to the great depression are sorta disconcerting.

traditional letter-of-guarantee style mixers are mostly broken, but there are still bitcoin mixers that can provide strong privacy guarantees.

the problem with some privacy coins is they aren't really that private. stay away from dash:


zcash and monero have their privacy drawbacks too:

it's important to remember, these are not real bitcoin markets. they are derivatives that settle to bitcoin. holding contracts at the wrong time can mean socialized losses. or the price can separate from the real spot market when leverage outweighs market depth.


to an extent you are right, but you are also making a whole lot of assumptions about supply and demand that we don't actually know. other exchanges might arbitrage down more than coinbase pro arbitraging up. it all depends on market conditions.

presently, it's somewhat trivial for blockchain analysis companies to monitor multiple blockchains for atomic swap contracts and equivalent value mixing transactions.

taproot will fix this by allowing users to obfuscate the underlying atomic swap on-chain. it can be made to look like any other standard transaction. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/etagx4/please_explain_taproot_and_schnorr_signatures/fffljnl/

if you do the bitcoin > 3rd party swap service > monero > 3rd party swap service > bitcoin thing, make sure to do some layered monero transactions in the middle. otherwise the swap service may have enough data to link your transactions together.

a lot of that is the same market makers splashing back and forth. there's probably fake volume added by the exchange too. once you've seen huobi doing several million BTC volume in a day, you start to be skeptical of these numbers.

binance futures also offers up to 125x leverage. i'm not saying everyone is leveraged that much, but it greatly skews the amount of real market depth. that's why derivatives can stray from real bitcoin spot prices during extreme volatility, like we saw in march on bitmex.

i wouldn't include derivative platforms in with real spot exchanges when measuring depth and volume, or at least i would control for the amount of leverage used. there is also a lot of faked market depth and faked volume across the industry in general too.

13k BTC dumped on coinbase pro or bitstamp would definitely affect the price. i can't see coinbase pro's full order book but the shortened version shows only ~1500 BTC depth down to $7100 ($600 away), so imagine how far 13k would go.

doesn't that assume bitcoin's price vs dollars won't ever drop during this "aggressive economic deflation"? if investors and consumers have less money to spend and they want to hold dollars, won't this dynamic pressure bitcoin prices down?

there are lots of ways that paper wallets can lead to losses though---even if generated offline: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet#Paper_wallet_flaws

i wouldn't recommend them. they are not intuitive enough for users.

we should probably start distinguishing between "traditional paper wallets" where users print out a private key using a popular browser-based software and "paper wallets as seed phrases written down". both should be generated offline but the former is much less secure.

we have to trust their closed source firmware for that to be true, the risk mitigation being that it was audited by a third party company:


that's enough to make me cautious. i would also be slightly worried about physical integrity. i really don't like the idea of having zero back-ups. it has a sweet design though, very slick looking.