I think you made the best point, which can just cover all other comments and requires no debates. It's just about perception of value, which can be attached to anything any time / or can forcibly change, and people's wealth perception and number-based calculated could immediately change. Some assets have shown to have long-lasting attached perception of wealth (land, gold, factors of production, etc.), while others - we just need to wait and see if it's same (Bitcoin), or it's not, or it will be completely another thing.



Another great point! But I was refering to those with Lambo with BTC place, or the ones that actively show off how much they good (on Twitter, Youtube, etc.) - that's the major point of analogy with iPhone/Tesla/etc. owners (I have nothing against either of those though).




Oh yes, there's gonna be huge difference between all of those (trader, businessman, lottery winner, etc.). The lottery winner is probably gonna be the most "fake rich" among others But as you correctly said, there's different type of "rich". Rich with 1,000 Bitcoins in many places will be nobody (go to the North of Russia and see yourself), while rich with actual $19,000,000 in the same place is gonna be a different story and probably the mayor would come to meet him in person




Absolutely agree with your points. Gold will be also the most easy "thing" to use as a medium exchange, since there will be no printers to print new USD, nor any computer to mine BTC/verify transactions/send money to someone (apart from yourself).

As noted above, neither I, neither our team, neither our company hates BTC or any crypto-asset (except for scammers). It's just an example of analogy that can be made based on how things in the world develop.


Yes, and you will end up owning the paper money or plastic or stone with BTC printed. But it won't be that type of asset owned by the "elites", will it?

Yeah, one of points also. What you refer to is "greater fool theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory)


Not at all - doesn't mean I think Bitcoin doesn't have a value. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, and our project wouldn't be starting with BTC as underlying first Just out of curiosity and analogy, had this possible thinking based on socio-economic trends, how iPhone, then Tesla, then now in China real estate developers - all playing on the same trend "fake rich", and with the above comments about "owning a number" - I guess it adds points to the theory about BTC also?


Come to China or Hong Kong and you will see 99.9% don't know what is Bitcoin or how to buy it, and you might have even 10 Bitcoins, but most of the people you meet will be more rich than you because they got apartments, which continually increase in price without drops (yes, it can be another topic for discussion about possible real estate bubble there).


Food, water, shelter, sleep, etc. - something what can satisfy basic needs - you are correct. I guess the rest of your comments are also correct but about Bitcoin - yes, it's good medium of exchange, very convenient for international transactions, etc. But when most of the people get $1,000,000 first time, what they do? - for for real estate, some FX, some equity, and might consider minor risky assets (you can check even those "currently rich" crypto millionaires / billionaires). So how do you think why? - do they want to finally get attached to the "true elites" with real wealth? If BTC on that level would be really as good as other assets (i'm not against any nor support any - everything is good for own purposes), why wouldn't they just buy all BTC they can? Then earn, then buy more, and more? And currently / historically / likely in the future the future of country / nation is decided not by the top-crypto holders, but by the ones with significant political influence, or by UHNWI & corporates. - this can be summarised, as they say in Russia "there are 2 types of politicians: 1) politicians who own banks, and 2) politicians who are owned by banks" - effectively it's bankers and their closed circle, not crypto-billionaires who get to decide what will be our future.

Well here I have to agree - shelter, food, and as another commenter said - water (basic needs) will matter only. But from there eventually people will have to restart economy for which they will need medium of exchange, which is unlikely to be BTC since there might be no electricity.


Here I agree about everything, but "isn't a new iPhone" - not so sure. It depends on how you perceive that. Can I buy with iPhone something? - yes. Can I "invest" in iPhone? - yes, - buy wholesale at pre-orders, and sell retail during public release (if you would be in China you would see that's a common model to earn money ). Yes, absolutely BTC & iPhone are incomparable in terms of life-span - you unlikely will see price appreciation of iPhone 10000% times like with BTC over 5-10 years (but the opposite), but for short period of time - can. Different lengths of cycles. Like some animals live only few days - for them it's a long live; for humans 100 years is a long live, but for some plants - 1,000 years is a long live. Just the difference on micro/macro levels. But eventually, while most of Forum participants are relatively young (unlikely to be 60-90s yo), and do wish to "be rich", but not all are ready to work hard for that. So they get to pay $19,000 (if they have) to own a number on the screen with the hope that in the future that number will be perceived even more expensive.


They are just "rich" now, for a moment in time when price hit $19k, but after a moment - there's a flash crush, and they are on the street? How about if you own 100 tones of gold? 100 apartments in NY? 100 production factories? - as opposed to owning "a number showing you have 100 numbers of X"

Good point I missed! And loved your point about ETFs and BTC-backed stocks of some companies


In the post-apocalyptic scenario even renewables are unlikely to save you. The only "widely-accepted and agreed on assets / forms of payment" will be left only real assets eventually, like gold, silver, etc. - something what is in possession by the "old elites" and the "truly rich", while the rest are left to play around with iPhones, Teslas and Bitcoins?..


Yes, totally agree. And who controls / owns those now? - I think the answer can be as I mentioned about "the truly rich - old elites"?


Well here we talk about globally accepted and consensus-based reference for intrinsic value of asset - market price. While it surely gives indication of your current net worth, it doesn't mean you are rich though. If today you hold 1,000 of Bitcoin and tomorrow every single country bans it and makes it illegal to hold Bitcoin, then you cannot even use it as collateral for getting loans. With gold (for example) such scenario is unlikely as making it illegal would mean collapse of all central banks (not the case with BTC), would mean end of production of important electronic components (not the case with BTC), collapse of supply chains and monetary systems (if Bitcoin dissapears tomorrow only small % of people will actually care, as most of the population still doesn't even know what that is). That's why doesn't that show you the similarity with Tesla / iPhone - small group of people worked together to hype it to make it as indication of own status and wealth, while in reality the truly wealthy ones stay with traditional side.

Happy to hear your and everyone's who is reading interest in as.exchange. We really appreciate that!

Thank you for your valuable recommendation - in fact what you mentioned about listing on coingecko, coinmarketcap, etc. is our top priority starting from beginning of 2021. Furthermore, we are engaging a reputable PR agency to help us with branding and media recognition. Therefore, soon you will start seeing articles about as.

As for other aspects, we totally understand the issue you mentioned that people might think "too good to be true" as you can see from the tread here (it's quite long though): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5299655.0 it's a simple math - just like with options and swaps when they came to market first time hundreds of years before. It takes time for people to understand new products, and for us to establish - social proof, which is not there yet as we launched just recently, but it will be there soon.

The company is registered in Hong Kong - the holding company is Alter Securities Limited (https://www.altersecurities.com/), registered in Hong Kong (https://hk.kompass.com/c/alter-securities/hknkc00030925/). And as.exchange is the brand of Alter Securities Limited (that is why it's as.exchange which stands for Alter Securities Exchange) specifically for current activities, because as you can see from Alter Securities web-site - we will be launching more financial products (and what is shown there is not even 1% of our ready to go R&D pipeline of new financial products).

For deposit and withdrawal - this will be forever 0.00% for everyone. It's your money in the end, and you shouldn't be paying for that to us simply for moving it around (yet, there's Bitcoin network fee, which you still end up paying, but of course not to us , maybe in the future we will cover that for users also).

Currently for first 10,000 registered users with a balance of $100 at least, trading fees are also 0.00% for 1 year. In the future, we will have other financial products where people might be paying very small fee (we will make sure that our fee is the smallest in the market). Furthermore, people who register after the first 10,000 will end up paying trading fee as specified here: https://as.exchange/fees

Furthermore, we will soon be adding OTC trading (similar to LocalBitcoins) - also with 0.00% trading fees, so stay turned

Answering your question - how we maintain the project: 1) The founding team has put all personal savings into the company, 2) We are raising equity round from local funds (it's not public, thus public cannot invest; and there will not be DeFi, or public useless token like issued by other exchanges to raise funding). Therefore, from that perspective - we are not one of those exchanges that launch on ICO or something, but a regular startup like Uber or Robinhood in the early years that did everything the right way without scaming people or selling useless digital assets.

Really appreciate your interest in TVS and our company! And you shouldn't worry about being new to the area - we all start with something. Even our CEO started many years ago from learning simple FV = PV x (1 + r) ^ n formula (the fundamental of finance), and now thanks to him we are getting a patent for completely new derivative

You are very correct. If the author of tread checks Tesla or Celsius Holdings equities - they will be amused that the YTD return was way higher than BTC return. A lot of Chinese equities also outperformed or performed at least as good as BTC. It's a matter of personal preferences and knowledge. Besides, as you correctly notes "The power of Bitcoin is that we finally have money that we truly own without needing to trust any centralized entity, while at the same time being really really scarce." - very correct point.

There has been many research papers, and the statistics are mostly pretty sad:
•   100% of people start trading with the hope of getting rich
•   80% of all traders quit within the first two years
•   Among all traders, nearly 40% trade for only 1 month
•   Within 3 years, only 13% continue to trade
•   After 5 years, only 7% remain trading
•   The average individual investor underperforms a market index by 1.5% per year
•   Active traders underperform market by 6.5% annually
•   Only 1.6% of traders remain profitable net of fees in the long-run

Who are in your opinion these ∼1% of traders? Why they are able to remain profitable? Are you sure you are one of them, if you include taxes, fees, etc.?

I know this post might sound ridiculous, but I just want you to think about this…

With the current socio-economic development (worsening) of situation, rich are getting richer, poor are getting poorer. Young generations are either trapped in “forever middle class”, or slip to the poverty, or understandingly (or not) work 9-5 (in some places 9-9-6) like in modern slavery…

However, the poor (not literally poor) ones want to show off, want to get hot girls, want to get attention from rich guys, want to show they also belong to the elite class. So what they can do? – They pretend to be rich / from higher social class.

This is one of the emotions / social factors well played by iPhone in the early days. While it was not the best option from functions, from what it could do, it was priced higher than the same Android-based models. Apple refused to compete in the same old “mobile phone” space, and made out of it a life-style or new generation, where you can be upper class, while not being from there actually (google the stories people selling kidneys or taking loans to buy the new iPhone). And they succeeded! Now if you don’t have the newest iPhone – you are not cool, and “even more poor than me“, while the real elites would be buying Vertu and those phones, “fake rich” happy showing they are rich, while not being one of them. And happy to overpay for it 

 Then comes Tesla. While being highly disadvantageous in terms of performance, design, external/internal interior design, and anything you can imagine as compared to the available at that time cars, they overpriced the very first model, added the ESG b*shit hype, and allowed you to feel part of the “elite new community” who care about environment, who own a car like iPhone (highly manageable from phone, etc.), and they refused to compete in the same pricing category as BMW, Ford, Nisan, etc. And they overpriced it. The story afterwards you know well too

With all the “fake rich” class people needed a new way of showing they are rich, while not being rich / failing to be rich. And Bitcoin, while not being created for that purpose (or being – idk), became a perfect target. Just think about it – you can own a line of code, and nothing more, but be a billionaire sitting on a large pool of digital currency.

YOU LITERALLY OWN A PIECE OF CODE, BUT YOU ARE BILLIONARE PERIOD

What is gonna happen once the post-apocalyptic scenarios come true? When/if there will be no electricity, computers, phones, etc.? People will value no US Dollar backed by state promise to pay off debt… your decentralized piece of code will not exist anymore (I do know about some offline-friendly cryptocurrencies)… only gold or natural resources will become valuable again.

While I do know many “Bitcoin evangelists” will probably hate me for the words above, but don’t you think that Bitcoin intentionally or unintentionally became the new asset for the “fake rich”?

Not sure if this should be posted here as a message, or the original post should be updated, thus for now will add here as comment to previous question.

How Tranched Value Security (TVS) can be further adjusted to even more transform underlying performance

TVS could potentially be issued on any asset, liability, equity, interest rate, exchange rate, market index, notional value or any other instrument, which has an assessable market value or price, with publicly traded securities being the easiest ones to deal with. TVSs can be issued with varying the initial issuance parameters, such as VVS or FVS. While the higher value share would represent less risk for the potential security buyers, and a smaller value share could significantly improve returns although amplifying the corresponding risks, which all together affect AP and DP in TVS.

Internal value enhancement mechanisms

•   In the presented above examples, it was assumed that at issuance: VVS * Spot Price = FVS, however, that is not a mandatory requirement, and they can be different, transforming the performance of underlying even further.

•   Also, it was assumed that VVS and FVS are fixed parameters in time, however, they can be floating and be attached to specific benchmark (like floating-rate swaps), specific rules (like barrier options), or specific events (like catastrophe bonds).

•   Moreover, it was previously assumed that TVSs with equity underlying and cryptocurrencies are perpetual in nature, they in fact could have maturity dates (like with futures and options), changing equity/cryptocurrency instrument in some cases to the fixed-income securities in payout structure (later will post case studies on that). The opposite can be done with TVSs with debt as underlying by rolling the TVS issuance in new debt with the same characteristics as the original one, thus transforming the initial bond into fixed-income equity or perpetual fixed income.

•   Another possible modification of TVS is the issuance with separate groups of underlying. For example, one issue of TVS could have the bond’s face value as underlying, while another TVS issue could have bond’s coupons as underlying. Same applies to equity and corresponding dividends, which would enhance performance of some value tranches on the expense of others.

•   Moreover, TVS could be issued with option, forward or swap-like terms, whereas one type forces the execution of value tranche on a specified future date, another one gives a right to execute the contract on or before the specified maturity, and swap forcing the exchange of differences in periodic values instead of the notional value exchange. Option-like TVSs can be similar to options in terms of giving a right to buy or sell a specific value share of underlying. Tranched Value Securities can be further be modified and issued on existing TVS (TVS-Squared), making them similar to Credit Default Swaps Squared (see above IMF's diagram), where a particular value tranche is backed by a number of specific value tranches in other TVSs.

Furthermore, some of the traditional credit enhancement mechanisms can be applied (well-known in securitization practice), such as:

•   Overcollateralization - with this support structure, the value of the underlying asset is larger than the security it backs (like $100 TVS backed by $120 BTC value), thus the issued security is overcollateralized. In this manner, even if some of the market value gets distorted to the limited extend, portion of it can be restored without TVS obtaining $0 value.

•   Reserve account - created to reimburse the issuing TVS for losses up to the amount allocated for the reserve. To increase value support, the reserve account could be non-declining throughout the life of the security, meaning that the account will increase proportionally up to some specified level as the outstanding value gets claimed by TVS holders.

External value enhancement mechanisms

•   Surety bonds - insurance policies (usually from external party) that reimburse the TVS for any or specific level of losses.

Thank you for your interest! Currently we have over 1,400 registered users, had over $50,000 worth of securitized BTC in the form of Tranched Value Securities being traded on the first day of going live (December 4th), and now approximately $30,000-$50,000 daily open interest which we try to match with own liquidity or with assistance of our trading partners.

We work hard to increase the community's knowledge of new financial products, and to gradually increase the liquidity. Moreover, we have a commitment from small Chinese hedge fund of securitized BTC in TVS $1m trading in late January - early February.

You had a great advise - we will try to share news and updates as much as possible.

You can also join our growing community on Telegram (https://t.me/exchange_as), where you can speak directly with our CEO as well

I assume that's because holding is just the easiest way for now. There should be someone like Robinhood but for crypto-derivatives to allow more people know about how to profit from various market opportunities in easy and simple way.

And thank you for your kind comment If you will have any recommendations or suggestions, please let me know - we will be happy to not just offer "build by traders for traders" but "by professionals for everyone", with what common people and everyone wants and understands.


No need for crystal ball at all. For example people could benefit not from "futures", but also forwards? from principal-protected products (call option combined with risk free asset)? from BTC-linked maturing swaps? cross-crypto swaps? there are many many other opportunities in fact, that are currently overlooked and ignored. But they could really benefit common people (with proper explanation of course). And apart from that there's something even more interesting that is being launched than those "well-known derivatives"😉

As for strategy, plan, etc. - you are right! But that exactly limits the "entry-level" for people. - too complicated, too hard, too risky, too volatile, too ... Shouldn't there be a pimplier way for common people to understand what it is and be able to get what they want?


Great profits = great risks, indeed mostly is the true case and known from finance theory, that expected return is compensation for taken risk. And I believe earlier in this tread I mentioned why even with long-term risk management is important. It's like with pension funds - they have very long investment horizon, but they take active approach in managing their risks. And art investors also take good care of their asset. Don't just throw painting of Picasso to the garage and say "I will come to check you after 15-20 years"

I totally didn't mean new ways of trading or new trading strategies - that's indeed a different topic (skill vs. luck vs. insight information vs. tools vs. products vs. strartegies), but I meant about new products (including what I mentioned above about principal protected notes).

Thank you very much for your kind feedback! It's my personal pleasure and ours as a team. We will continually work hard to improve product offerings and platform.

If you have any kind of feedback or recommendations, feel free to reach out to us - happy to heard it

Yes, that's one of the ways, but in such case you also lose (even though you can estimate how much you can lose), but what if the price slips and passes your stop limit without getting executed? Especially with flash crashes (which increase in frequency due to algo-trading activity (not only in crypto, but also stocks)) - stop limits typically don't save people. As for regular trading activity, it might be good, but in long-term holding BTC, wouldn't using call / put option be beneficial?

Thank you for for your kind comment. Indeed TVS was under the radars for the past year, as we were applying for patent, and intentionally didn't announce anywhere (apart from some academic research papers when it was safe to do so).

Feel free to ask any questions either here, or in the tread about TVS - where you feel more comfortable with, because i believe other people might have similar questions And it can be very useful to everyone to learn how they can get rid of the risk that BTC drops in market price sometimes, yet have ability to preserve the upside potential.

That's what happens when those projects issue "another useless token" or do "decentralized DeFi and then get "hacked" (often actually it's fake and it's exit-scam)". That's why those things are completely out of scope for us and will never be implemented (not self-promotion)

Sure, DCA is very common easy to implement, and relatively cheap way to actively managing your portfolio of assets / investments. However, based on history, other portfolio management strategies perform better than DCA. For example by simply implementing different ways of rebalancing portfolio, depending on market stage, you can get way better results than with DCA. And that's not to mention different types of financial products or more advanced financial strategies.

Here you can learn more about different "easy" ways of dynamic portfolio management strategies (buy&hold, constant proportion, constant mix) from Stanfrod: https://web.stanford.edu/class/msande348/papers/PeroldSharpe.pdf


You are absolutely correct about the true purpose of BTC. However, two points to be made - 1) we don't know what Satoshi had actually in mind (maybe it was a smart way to create new asset for trading? (I know sounds ridiculous, but it's possible)), 2) even with traditional currencies (USD, EUR, JPY, CNY, SDR) and commodities (gold, silver, etc.) - they are not created for making anyone rich... but because of supply & demand imbalances and market inefficiencies - they will eventually make someone super rich, and someone super poor. Same with Bitcoin. So it's like when you fall down in river, and just lay there and say "whatever happens is okay, otherwise it's too complicated trying to get out / to survive / not to "earn" / dealing with side-effects".

Furthermore, there's a great article about Bitcoin tech/economics together: http://coinmetrics.io/bitcoin-an-unprecedented-experiment-in-fair-distribution No matter what Satoshi's vision was, this is the reality that took place, and people will either suffer from side-effects (eventually they become the main effects), or will take active role in managing own wealth and earn/lose with it.