Agree that bitcoin is at present a highly speculative asset for investment during the 'good times', and the first thing that people pull money out of at times of crisis... but... we can't deny that the current global economic situation is throwing a harsh spotlight on the fiat system and its inadequacies. I would be surprised if this wasn't making more people understand the inherent strengths of bitcoin and take a punt on its long-term future as a (negatively-correlated) safe-haven. Not so much 'normal people' who are losing jobs and experiencing financial insecurity - but if I was a millionaire with traditional assets all over the place, I'd certainly be taking a look at crypto right now for at least a percentage of my portfolio.

Don't know who moved it, but it makes more sense to be in P&S as it is not about Economics. It's not punishment, it's good housekeeping. This one should be in P&S too - or deleted for duplication! You should probably move it and/or lock it.


Edit:
Partly PETA maybe... but also COVID-19. This is not the time to go out hunting for delicious bats and pangolins.

Apologies, I normally provide a source but forgot to in this instance. Figures are from the Office of National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths

If you want more detail, this is probably a clearer example:
https://www.ft.com/content/40fc8904-febf-4a66-8d1c-ea3e48bbc034



Note - excess mortality is higher in some parts of the UK than in others - but there is an excess in every region.

I know what's coming next - no, I didn't count the individual deaths myself, so I am relying on data obtained by professionals.
Just do a Google image search for 'excess deaths 2020' or similar.

If you don't believe it, then why not look at total deaths irrespective of attributed cause? Here's the UK total deaths over the last 4 months, compared with the 5-year average.
Something has killed large numbers of people in April 2020. What do you think that might be?

It's not broken. Inequality is a feature, not a bug. The system is working entirely as intended.

I totally agree. It's not just the pandemic, this has been going on for decades. Just look at the last 40 years:


https://boingboing.net/2017/12/14/oligarchy-on-ice.html

You can actually do most of those things. For many of them, the problem is just that countries have laws, and there are consequences for breaking those laws.

The alternative as others have said is to live somewhere where laws are either not enforced or don't exist. But even if you move to a failed state or an anarchist utopia, you can't escape the fundamental underlying issue here, which is that your actions have consequences. If you live in the world, your actions impinge on the world and on its other inhabitants. Some of those inhabitants, whether law enforcement officers or not, will always take offence at your activities, and may take steps against you.

Just had a quick trip around the world via VPN. Nothing much different to what has already been posted above... although the first suggestion for 'bitcoin is' from Canada was 'bitcoin Islam'

I do get annoyed by people saying 1) bitcoin is supposed to be a safe-haven store-of-value, therefore 2) people should having flocked to bitcoin once CV19 hit, which didn't happen, therefore 3) bitcoin cannot be a safe-haven store-of-value.
I agree with your summary above in the sense that bitcoin is currently and was previously a highly speculative asset, and has the potential at some point in the future to become a store-of-value.
Bitcoin now and bitcoin 'end state' are very different things.

Your third line, I agree.
Your second line, I would argue that a store-of-value should increase, at least intermittently (we are measuring against fiat). Bitcoin needs to be stable if it is to be used as a currency, not as a store-of-value.
But the reasoning in lines 2 and 3 undermine your first line, because you are talking about the past. You can't say that bitcoin will never in future be a store-of-value ("at any time"), and base this conclusion entirely on what bitcoin has been so far.
Bitcoin certainly has the potential to become a safe-haven and a store-of-value. Of course it isn't yet, because of the volatility, which is largely a consequence of the comparatively thin markets... but it's difficult to deny that potential.

Yes, exactly.

As above. Contactless and mobile for purchases where you have to physically be there, for everything else you can still use your bank card online (or Paypal or similar). This isn't specifically a time to be using bitcoin, it's simply a time not to be using paper and metal money.

Bitcoin has the potential to be a safe haven. At the moment though we are some way from that point; the volatility in particular make it more of a highly speculative asset. I do think it will become a safe haven eventually, just not for some years yet.

Similar for me, I heard about it in the first few years, it seemed interesting so I thought I'd look into it. Unfortunately my research was only superficial, I read a few articles that explained that bitcoin was a reward you got for solving complex maths puzzles. I couldn't see the point of it, I couldn't see why these puzzles needed to have a reward, couldn't see why bitcoin would have any value, particularly as these weren't problems that needed to be solved - why arbitrary puzzles rather than say working on protein folding or medical research? Initially, I missed the whole point of it. I suspect that if instead I'd managed to find an article about how bitcoin arose as a response to the financial crisis and was devised as a new decentralised monetary system, and the 'maths puzzles' were simply the distribution mechanism rather than the overall purpose, then I'd have been much more interested and would have leapt in there and then.

... I paid the price for my poor research, didn't finally understand what it was until 2017.

No.

Yes. The part I don't understand is the thinking behind why the issuance of more tether would cause a price dump for XRP.
USDT is a stablecoin, if it increases in marketcap then this is because more tether have been issued (barring temporary fluctuations when the markets are particularly turbulent). This says absolutely zero about XRP. Can't see a connection here at all, beyond maybe some minor psychological effect of seeing XRP drop a place because more tether have been released.

I second what jackg said - electron tunneling is a barrier to further size reduction; the continuation of Moore's law is constrained by the laws of physics. As size reduces, quantum effects such as wave-particle duality become more apparent, and classical approximations are no longer sufficient. You can't just reduce size indefinitely.

Bit of a tangent, but a recent development in quantum computing is that tunneling could become a feature, not a bug...

Sneak preview of the ballot paper for Nevada and Michigan.

I remember this coin being the 'next big thing' a couple of years ago, I did buy a small amount at that time, then I sold once the price started dropping, and I haven't seen it again since. Sad to read this thread now and see that the coin has dropped so much - it did seem to have a lot of promise. But yes, it does look now as though this is a terminal decline towards $0, barring some dramatic and unexpected reversal.

Having said that, if you still hold some now, then the price is so low that it might easily get pumped x2 or more, or have a succession of pumps and dumps, so might be worth holding onto for a bit.

So - whether your figures are accurate or not - you're saying that for anything that causes fewer deaths than driving, we should just ignore it as it's not important?
That's not a compelling argument as it completely ignores the effects of attempts at prevention and management. As franky1 pointed out, you are measuring "COVID-19 with precautions taken" deaths, and saying it's low so we don't need to take precautions.

Kind of like saying deaths are really low for people who jump out of a plane wearing a parachute, therefore parachutes are a waste of money, let's all jump out of a plane without one.

Why would issuance of more Tether impact the XRP price? If there are more Tether coins, that surely has zero bearing on the merits or otherwise of a totally different coin.
Sure if a different coin supplants XRP as #3 in marketcap, there might be some psychological effect - but not when it's a stable coin. What if Tether suddenly issue another 160b coins and take #1 spot from bitcoin? Doesn't make bitcoin worthless.

Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I'm sure some alts will outperform these two, but most won't. I would just have Bitcoin in my list, but Ethereum does I believe stand out some distance from other alts both in strength of use case and in history of development, and with 2.0 coming, and with it staking, I think the current price of $200 looks cheap.

The more times you repeat the experiment, the closer the results get to 50/50. Have a look at the law of large numbers. Each individual coin toss gives a random result, but those random results average closer and closer to 50% with each additional coin toss you make. This is how casinos work. They can make a big loss on an individual game, but they know the overall percentage over many games averages out in their favour.

Of course in theory the outcome of an individual coin toss is pre-determined and dependent on spin speed and direction, air resistance, etc - but that's a separate issue.

Player514 gives the correct answer above.

If an example helps, let's consider all possible outcomes, based on a single coin toss being 50/50 heads or tails.

1 coin toss:
H
T
2 outcomes, 50% chance of each (1/2)

2 coin tosses:
HH
HT
TH
TT
4 outcomes (2^2), 25% chance of each (1/4). So 25% chance of HH, 50% chance of one head one tail (TH outcome plus HT outcome), 25% chance of TT.

3 coin tosses:
HHH
HHT
HTH
HTT
THH
THT
TTH
TTT
8 outcomes (2^3), 12.5% chance of each. So for example chance of getting exactly 2 heads one tail is 37.5% ( = 3/8 = 3 outcomes out of the 8 total), in bold above.

The maths might appear complicated, but is actually quite straightforward. Have a look at this for an example of calculating probability of winning a lottery.

Yes.
The chance of the 10th coin being heads is 50%.
But the chance of all 9 preceding coins being heads is (1/2)^9, or 1/512.
So the 10th coin being heads makes your overall sequence ten consecutive heads, so the formula becomes (1/2)^10, or 1/1024.