Considering how the Swiss were the banking partners of Nazi Germany and currently aid the affluent in tax evasion in their home nations, I reckon they're a fan of anything they can exploit to their own benefit. It's not particularly surprising to find they might purposefully embrace something in Bitcoin that other nations aren't, especially since their banks rather openly aid people in breaking their own laws on taxation and sheltering off the book assets.

Swiss Bank UBS Faces Tax Fraud Trial in France:   https://www.thelocal.ch/20170321/swiss-bank-ubs-faces-tax-fraud-trial-in-france
Swiss Bankers Complicit in Billionaire Client’s Tax Evasion:  https://www.thewealthadvisor.com/article/swiss-bankers-complicit-billionaire-clients-tax-evasion
The Role of Swiss Financial Institutions in the Plunder of European Jewry:   https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings/sinister.html

Swiss support doesn't bode well automatically given their by-design morally questionable institutions.

Just because you don't agree with something doesn't make it FUD. Buffet's criticisms of Bitcoin are completely warranted. Buffet's problem with Bitcoin is it's not a productive asset. It doesn't produce income or any return, and it's only worth what you can sell it to someone else for, who also will only realize a return when they can sell it again to someone else for an even higher price. That's Buffet's same criticism of gold. Speculative assets don't create value, they only represent the value other people put on it. By comparison, productive assets have inherent value. Also, Bitcoin's price rise will affect Buffet's empire in absolutely zero ways. Berkshire is such a diverse business (of real investments that produce real income, not just a collection of assets that do nothing) that anyone trying to sell the story of Buffet being scared by Bitcoin doesn't understand what actual investing is, or how Buffet became a billionaire. The fact that you're so desperate not to have anyone agree with Buffet further makes the point that you can't make any money with Bitcoin unless there are other people who agree with your idea of what Bitcoin is worth. Lucky people get rich investing in speculative assets. Real investors grow their wealth through the accumulation of productive assets. Don't confuse what you're doing with anything other than wishing upon a star.

Without new people coming in to the market, it's just the same pool of people trading Bitcoin back and forth amongst themselves, and essentially there is no way to make money without other people losing money. Without new investors bringing new money into the pool, it's essentially a zero sum game because bitcoin is not a productive asset. It doesn't produce income, it's only worth what someone is willing to pay you for it. So the only way to realize a profit on owning Bitcoin is to buy it from someone and to sell it to someone else for more than what you paid for it. Because Bitcoin relies on new participants to increase in value, this is what causes some people to accuse it of operating like a pyramid scheme, even though it's not set up to be one specifically.

Do you for some reason not understand that "buy" means move into the market and "sell" means move out of the market? If you don't understand such a basic concept, you probably should feel self-conscious about the sophistication of the advice you're hocking.

Just to recap here, every time you buy and sell bitcoin, you're moving in and out of the market. Every move you make in a market opens you up to inefficiency, which you're catching on both sides (up and down, IN and OUT) every time you're not perfectly calling a peak or valley. There are people who tried to beat the buy and hold mentality and they have invariably failed. Warren Buffet famously challenged any hedge fund to outperform the S&P 500 over a ten year period in a million dollar bet, and only one hedge fund trader was confident enough to take the bet. He lost by a landslide, because statistically speaking, you cannot outperform the market over long periods of time by actively trading, and Warren Buffet knew this and preyed on the ignorance of people who didn't. The steep decline in the number of actively managed hedge funds over the last 20 years is due to the fact that investors are learning this now too on a large scale. Those very few who do outperform the overall market in the short term are what statisticians would call lucky, and they revert to the mean before too long. The fact that you're losing efficiency by actively trading is supported by the fact that nobody can do it over the long term.

Nobody needs Bitcoin to have a digital economy with digital cash. Cash and digital cash are fungible and completely interchangeable already. You swap one for the other every time you interact with an ATM, either putting money in or taking it out. Cash and digital cash don't compete with each other, they function interchangeably. There's nothing really to back up transactions being safer on the Bitcoin network compared to the MasterCard network (for example). The only real difference is that Bitcoin transactions can't really be reversed by one party, which is a significantly overvalued attribute considering the number of transactions this would be a benefit to is immeasurable compared to the number of transactions effected without controversy.

This is the problem with celebrity endorsements. Many of them are shilling their own coins or ICO or otherwise being paid in some way to shill crypto generally so they can shill a specific coin. Nobody ought to confuse publicity with utility, and just because someone you've heard of before is talking about crypto doesn't make it a good investment. Fame doesn't magically imbue someone with investment knowledge. The only famous people worth listening to about investments are those who are famous because of their investment knowledge, like Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, Robert Shiller, etc. All these guys are well-known because they're excellent investors. Listening to 50 Cent or some random soccer player about crypto is ridiculous.

Who can ever forget the great economic teachings of the imitable Tyler Durden.  It's hard to take seriously a bunch of clowns who peddle conspiracy theories under a pseudonym on the internet, but let's pretend anyway.

You have to zoom out 100 years to make an argument that the dollar is not stable. Over years, the dollar is stable. Over decades, the dollar is predictably fairly stable. In both cases, the stability is great enough allow long term planning and storage of value and for people to be reasonably certain what their stored value will be worth for long periods of time. Ostensibly, Tyler Durden would be a fan of Bitcoin, but in contrast to the USD, Bitcoin miserably fails the store of value and reasonably certainty of value aspects of a useful currency over any stretch of time.

Because you have to zoom out so far to find meaningful loss of value for holding USD, and because nobody holds wealth in USD for 100 years, the "loss of value" purported to have been suffered has never actually been realized by anyone. If you had a physical dollar 100 years ago, it would be depreciated, yes. But, you didn't have a dollar 100 years ago because you weren't alive 100 years ago. And the people who were alive didn't hold value in cash currency for 100 years. In short, the dollar has devalued by 95% over the last 100 years but nobody has lost 95% of their stored value due to depreciation of the dollar.

Most importantly, there is no such thing as perfect money. What we have in the USD is stable over long periods of time and due to the nature of value and an inability to reliably store it in this universe, that's the best you're ever going to get. Money itself isn't value; it's a representation of value, meaning it represents real things that are produced and consumed that people want/need in the present. This is the key point here: You cannot possibly store more value than what can ever be consumed in the present, so expecting a representation of value that was created 100 years ago to hold perfectly for goods that will no longer exist when it is to be spent is unreasonable. Money depreciates necessarily over time unless we can perfectly store all the value ever created, which we cannot because we constantly destroy value by consuming goods or through depreciation of real assets over time. As the value that the money represents is destroyed/consumed over time without a corresponding reduction in the money supply, money necessarily has to lose value over time.

The price rises and falls rapidly because Bitcoin is essentially not used for anything except speculation. If it had a general baseline utility, it would be much more stable, but everyone is just chasing gains and hoping to get rich by trading it. That's not to say it can't be useful for certain applications or that nobody uses it for commerce or trade, but they're so far in the minority that those cases are rather insignificant in terms of what is determining the price at any given moment. Far more impactful are the momentum traders and speculators who pile in and out trying to make more money.

These are the types of assumptions the experiment was designed to test on a larger scale, so it's disappointing the program is being terminated without adequate data or longevity to satisfactorily provide any useful data on the matter.  Such a program wouldn't be financially impossible though, especially if it replaces all current welfare programs. In that sense, the additional spending is quite limited and easily sustainable with a modest tax on the rich or a reduction in other expenditures, say military spending for example. A modest cut in military spending would easily fund the difference, and considering the US spends more on the military than the next 8 or so countries combined, can afford it.


While true in very general and over-simplified terms, this doesn't pan out much in the real world. The US used to be the manufacturing hub of the world, but when those jobs started getting lost to automation and outsourcing, the US didn't suddenly become a country of poor, unemployed workers. People pursued other opportunities and created new services and products.  The difference here is that the loss of manufacturing jobs happened on a decades-long scale, and the displacement of jobs allowed the economy time to absorb the displacement, which happened rather slowly.  The difference now is that automation has become so much faster and affected jobs that were previously thought to be immune that there is no clear way for the economy to absorb the loss of millions of jobs in such a short time frame.  It will be far more destabilizing now.  UBI can help by providing people the basic income to survive and the opportunity to then pursue new products and services, thereby growing the economy, instead of being forced into survival mode and scraping to get by.  UBI would never be enough to let people live in the middle class comfortably, just enough to keep people out of destitution. 

Also, production comes from demand, not the other way around. You can produce anything, but if there's no demand for the product or services created, the venture will soon fail. When people demand a good or service, you can afford to employ people to provide it, or create it through automation. There is little risk of overproducing anything because the market naturally adjusts price, so it's a problem that solves itself.

From the perspective that the rich have absolutely designed the government and the tax laws to their own advantage, universal basic income is appealing as an instrument to help balance the scales that have been tipped so far in the wealthy classes' favor to the detriment of other classes. From the perspective that automation is continuing to destroy jobs and more and more industries will be disrupted by it, and full employment is becoming less and less likely in the future, universal basic income is even more appealing. We've seen what happens to countries that have a high degree of permanent unemployment in younger demographics, and they become incredibly violent without much, if any, exception. A program like UBI could alleviate the need for the social security program and all other welfare programs. It would likely make our social programs more efficient while also expanding the economy as it would provide people the economic freedom to create new things. However, the numbers being proposed seem too low at $500 per month to do properly. Finland started a universal basic income experiment in 2017, but sadly I think it has already been abandoned.

This is, generally, why people look down on crypto investors and why they are so easily swindled out of their money. If you think that you should be able to buy something and have it reliably go up in value by "10-30%" in a period of 6 months, then you are detached from reality. The world doesn't work that way, otherwise nobody would be poor if everyone could just double their money every couple years by investing. Investing is inherently risky. Investing in crypto is manifestly more risky than traditional equity investing. Only fools don't realize that, and it's very easy to separate a fool from their money, which is why you see so many of them get scammed in the crypto space.

It's not unfair to view it as hypocrisy, but alternatively, you get more bang for the buck right now mining Bitcoin than Bitcoin Cash. It is more profitable in USD equivalent to mine BTC than it is BCH, so it is equally likely (if not more) that they're just seeking to maximize their resources. I think it would be hypocritical if they were mining Bitcoin and not converting to BCH, as that would imply they don't really believe in the future of their own version of the coin. The fact that they are converting doesn't imply hypocrisy to me personally, it just looks like they're trying to take advantage of low exchange rates and amass as much BCH as they can because they believe in it. I suspect that if it were more profitable to mine BCH in a USD/hash comparison, they would be mining that instead.



This is easily explained by a high degree of variance that exists in these markets. You didn't point out all the times BCH goes down more than BTC, which is constantly, so this one particular data point isn't meaningful because they tend to revert to the mean rather quickly.

This presupposes you can efficiently move in and out of markets and call every reversal in momentum correctly, which isn't possible. If anyone could do this, it would break the market and there would be consistent billionaires minted from this approach. The fact is this this can't be reliably done. Even the best hedge funds that employ the smartest PhD analysts and deploy the most sophisticated modeling algorithms lose to something as basic as the S&P over long stretches of time. The longer the time horizon, the more likely they are to lose as the more moves you make, the greater the variance you expose yourself to. Every time you're wrong about where the market is going and have to adjust your approach, you've lost efficiency you would have gained by just holding.

It's a savings account, it's one of the safest and therefore lowest return investments you can make. Return is correlated with the risk of the investment, and if it's too low risk low return for you, don't put your money in a savings account. Banks are in the business of underwriting loans, and in order to do that, they need deposits. If they don't have enough deposits, they raise interest rates to attract more money chasing low risk returns. So in many ways, bitching about the return on savings account is pointless because it's a market-determined rate. It would be like complaining that everyone else thinks Bitcoin is worth $9,000 (which is the market price) but you think it's worth $15,000 and are mad at what the market has decided. If the rate is too low, don't put your money in the bank. Or better yet, if banks have it so good because they pay so little and charge so much, start your own bank if you think it's just so easy.

I think you don't know how investing works. First, market cap can't be fake because it's just a computation of two inputs (price and units available) and the only way to have a "fake" marketcap is for either of the inputs to be fake. We know neither are, so it's not a fake marketcap anymore than Bitcoin's is a fake marketcap. Second, companies spin off all the time from previous companies and the two companies separately are worth more in total than the individual company was before the split. The most recent case is when PayPal spun off of eBay and the marketcap of both companies soon was much larger than eBay's marketcap was when it owned PayPal itself. This is because spinning off an entity into its own company unlocks value that might not have been represented when it was a subsidiary of the other company. BCH wasn't owned by BTC, so it's a little different in that respect, but it's by no means strange for a company to be worth substantially more overnight after being spun out into a separate entity.


Yeah, that's fair. Trying to hijack the name is shady, and not to defend them, but I do believe that they believe they're being more true to the original vision of Satoshi than the current developers, so I think they believe themselves to be the true Bitcoin. It's like when religious sects split off and each side labels the other side as heretics for not being true believers. Looks like the same mentality here by both sides.

On the one hand, small businesses might be more likely to experiment with crypto in an effort to differentiate themselves or bring in more customers by appealing to a niche market. It certainly gets them a lot of attention in this circle when they put up signs saying "Bitcoin Accepted Here" because people widely share photos of that on places like Reddit. On the other hand, small businesses are likely to have less leeway when it comes to financial resources and would not be able to weather large fluctuations in the price like a larger company could that is experimenting with accepting crypto. If the businesses is instantly accepting and converting crypto to USD, then it's much less of a problem, and likely this is the only way they can manage it.

The benefit of holding over long periods is that it will capture the general trend without being concerned with shorter term variance and day-to-day price fluctuations. The more you trade in and out, the more variance you expose yourself to in the day-to-day price movements and the medium term trends. The longer your time frame for holding, the smoother those price movements get, and you get the average of whatever the long term trend is. If you were an early adopter, the long term trend has been hugely positive, even though at any point there are constant small and medium (and even large) crashes. If you were trading daily, you might increase your gains by correctly guessing what way the market will move and catching it up and down, but far more likely you're inefficiently capturing the long term average upward movement by being out of the market for some of those times or guessing wrong some of the time.

I don't know what it "should" be, only what it is. Functionally, I don't see a difference between the two right now. BTC is far more widely adopted, and BCH has a potential benefit in avoiding congestion longer by having larger block size which is a solution that may ultimately never be needed. All the difference in culture, for lack of a better term, is arbitrary and not terribly important to me. There seems to be a lot of yelling on both sides, which I just discount for the most part. I don't know the motivations of the BCH folks, I only know the common arguments people ascribe to them which are laden with emotion and subjective venom, so I don't find them overly compelling, just a lot of noise. At the end of the day, I only care that one of them works and works well. Right now they both work, and I have no problem with that.

That's because the stock market has been the largest driver of wealth creation in the modern American economy. You don't win betting against the stock market or the American economy for long periods of time. Rodgers seems to be a permabear, and while he has made a lot of money correctly betting against certain things at different points in time, he's been constantly bearish on the economy for the last 40 years, and if you were out of the market for that period of time because you were bearish on it, you would have missed an extraordinary wealth gain. $1000 invested in the S&P index in 1980 would be worth $24,000 today ($66,000 if you were reinvesting dividends the whole time). 24x (or 66x) your investment over a time period where someone has constantly been saying a crash is around the corner makes my point. Crashes happen, and sometimes Rodgers gets it right, but if you ignore that and stay invested for long periods of time, you get wealthier by investing in the American economy.

Who's going to go so far to circumvent the law for a coin that can't be used for commerce because it's illegal, can't be freely traded in public, and with which all association is illegal? Sure, demand would just stay constant or even increase after it becomes illegal and people face financial penalties or jail time. You're delusional mate. Bitcoin has a hard enough time getting adopted when it's perfectly legal, how delusional do you have to be to believe it'll be more so if it were completely outlawed? As it is, the only thing it's demanded for right now is get rich quick dreams because people are wealthy enough to speculate on an inherently worthless asset that produces no income and whose only functional utility is promised years down the road in vague and poorly conceived ways. A vast minority of bitcoin is used as a currency or in commerce right now, but sure, that'll all change if it were outlawed.


Nice alternative fact. I'm sure nobody here remembers the months-long period where fees and transaction times were sky high due to all the spam transactions clogging up the mempool. You pretty much summed up everything wrong with Bitcoin by admitting that you don't use it and are just holding it. The only way you can realize a gain on it is to find someone to sell to higher than what you paid for it, and like I said, if it were illegal, you wouldn't and because people would no longer expect to make a profit from it coupled with the legal repercussions, demand would collapse.