I suppose, technically, you can make money from holding a stablecoin if the coin it is pegged to is rising in value against your native currency. But realistically there isn't going to be much movement unless something catastrophic is happening in your own economy.

... but you should avoid Libra for the reasons I gave above.

Evidence: Donald Trump 'bought' a load of pianos.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/i-sold-trump-100000-worth-of-pianos-then-he-stiffed-me-a7335951.html

Why? So that he could practice his scales. Reptiles have scales. This is proof that Trump is the Reptile-in-Chief and has been buying up industrial quantities of supplies for his lizardy minions.

Want further evidence of his saurian credentials? Okay...

Here he is basking under heat lamps.


And here are some eggs he laid at the White House.


Also, I think this thread badly needs the input of @notbatman to provide a sanity injection.

The biggest shock for some people will be when they wake up on 31st Jan and realise that nothing has changed. It's absurd, but a lot of people genuinely believe that the 'Brexit date' is a sharp cut-off where Brexit suddenly magically happens, everything is instantly different, and all 'foreigners' leave. I was walking through a market the other day, and I actually heard a woman ask her friend 'Will they be laying on coaches to take them all back home?' There isn't a lot of understanding that a long and tortuous negotiation process lies ahead.

Regardless of whether you are Leave or Remain inclined, the level of ignorance out there is astonishing.

It’s true that once people have a certain basic standard of living, they don’t care about inequality, but I would argue that this is, at least to an extent, because they have been deliberately conditioned not to care about it.
There are a huge number of people who have been ‘left behind’ by the rising inequality of the past few decades (the disenfranchised white working class being one subset), people who haven’t shared the benefits of a richer society but instead have become its victims, with higher house prices and higher cost of living, lower wages and insecure employment terms, poorer pension provision, etc. I would argue that these people do feel that they are victims and do want to strike back against their oppressors, if only at the ballot box.

This is where it becomes apparent that the phrase ‘capitalist democracy’ is an oxymoron. Capitalist societies, as we all know, are plutocratic by nature, and ‘democracy’ is a thin veneer. The rich control the traditional media, and are throwing huge sums of money into ensuring that they have effective control of social media, too. Their strategy is and always has been to deflect any blame from themselves, and instead make the common people fight amongst themselves. In the UK, they have been very effective in convincing people that the reason they have bad jobs and no money is not because society is set up so that the rich cream off all the wealth, but rather because foreigners are ‘coming over here and taking your jobs’. Most notably they have used the EU as a scapegoat, hence Brexit. I’m not as familiar with US politics, but I’m well aware of Trump’s wall to keep out those pesky Mexicans.
I do think that people care about being the victims in an unfair society, it’s just that they are misled as to the cause of that unfairness.

Having said all that, I’m not sure what the answer is, and how we ensure that when people vote, they are actually voting according to their own views that they themselves have developed, rather than as a superficial knee-jerk reaction to whatever the tabloid headlines or curated social media outrages impel them towards. How do we get people to think for themselves? And if we succeed, will we be faced by a new problem – the poor may vote for what they believe is a fairer society, but are they doing so out of self-interest in improving their own personal lot, or because they genuinely care about fairness and equality of opportunity? Difficult questions with no obvious answers.


True, and whilst the rich have always manipulated us through newpapers, TV etc, these are fairly blunt mass-targeted instruments. Social media can be far more insidious. Facebook puts a huge amount of effort into behavioural profiling, mapping individual minds with ever increasing detail. Facebook knows not just how we react to certain prompts, but also why we do so, and this can and is ushering in an age where our viewpoints are being manipulated and developed on an individual level, and with a degree of subtlety that makes it difficult to determine the extent to which ‘our’ opinions are actually our own. It is quite terrifying, and it acts to thin whatever veneer of democracy remains.

Should be, yes. It's obvious to me, it's obvious to you, but literally billions of people use FB and love it. I suspect many will use Libra purely because of ease of use through its integration with the platform. Thankfully this project has kicked up a lot of opposition from the powers that be, and so is at least momentarily derailed... but I suspect it will eventually go live; FB is not known for giving up.

Whilst the vampiric sucking out of personal data is one aim, I suspect another is that the USD will eventually be pegged to Libra, rather than the other way around. Facebook is not known for thinking small.

I would advise to stay well away from Libra. As others have said, the idea was for it to be a stablecoin, so it's not like it would increase in value.
Far more importantly however, I think it is a good idea to stay well away from Facebook. Their business model is surveillance capitalism; the old adage that "if it's free, then you're the product" is absolutely true in this case. Facebook makes money from your behavioural data. Firstly they sell it on to other companies for advertising, but secondly and more insidiously they use it for behavioural profiling and to predict (and indeed influence) your future actions. Libra is the next step - if you buy things with Libra, you are giving Facebook your purchase history, too.

This isn't just scaremongering, take a look at this warning from Amnesty International, or read the excellent "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff.

I definitely agree with that. I would argue that this is because a thing is always experienced most intensely by means of its opposite. Life is thrown into focus by the chance of death. Take another example, loneliness, would you feel more lonely if you were shut up in a house by yourself, or if you were sat in a restaurant by yourself and every other table had couples and groups? Is silence more intense when it arises in an environment that is already fairly quiet, or when a loud noise stops? Does the colour white look brighter if it is against a mottled background of shades of grey, or if it is against pure black?

If we were looking long-term, then I would say the most valuable altcoin can be determined by use case. You look at things like smart contracts, fast payments, IoT coins, supply chain stuff... In order to determine the best alt, you start with the best use case, then you go backwards and look for the coin that is best placed to be the leader for that use case.  I won't name specific coins because that would be seen as shilling. I'm just saying long-term, this is how you establish which coin is best.

Short-term, and 2020 is certainly short-term, prices are likely to be governed more by speculation than anything else. The top alt will be the one that has the best development and the best news. The top performing alt however, in terms of percentage price increase, is a different matter and can be determined purely by FOMO driven craziness, as we've seen with BSV recently.

Just saying that long-term good coins and short-term price increases are entirely separate things.

I don't have to imagine it. Yes the volatility makes it a superb coin for short-term trading, and people can and are making huge money from it.

But long-term I'm still very skeptical. Maybe it is good, maybe it's not. The problem is that the fortunes of BSV are too tied in to the cult of Craig Wright. Look at the recent surge because of the Tulip lies stuff.

Also why is it called Bitcoin SV, when it should be called Bitcoin CWV? It's Craig Wright's vision, isn't it, rather than Satoshi's? Because obviously these are not the same person...

No-one knows or can accurately predict when XRP will hit a certain price. All we can do is look at what is influencing price movements. If you do some research, you will see that there is plenty of good news around XRP (not just Ripple the company), which should push the price upwards. The reason it is not moving up is that there is downwards pressure as well, mainly from Ripple themselves dumping new tokens onto the market each month - 1 bn from Escrow each time. Now a lot of these end up going back to Escrow, but the point is they are released and it causes price suppression. So at the moment we are in an uneasy middle ground where there is a lot of pushing on price from both directions. I would suggest that when one side finally gains enough traction to cause a price movement, we may see a quite dramatic shift, indeed this sort of pressure building in both directions followed by a sudden release may be why we have seen such sharp price changes in this coin in the past.

TL;DR It's a good coin but its price is being held back. If it starts moving, chances are it will move quickly.

My thoughts are this would be awful. It would end up the same as anything, with cost proportional to quality. At the top end you'd have ultra-qualified world-leading surgeons charging huge amounts of money to perform routine operations to perfection, and at the bottom end you'd have some drunkard with a rusty hacksaw willing to remove body parts for a dollar. Quality of care would be determined solely by your ability to pay. Only the richest people would get the best care, average people would get average care, the poor and vulnerable would get disastrous care.

I understand your idea, but for me the implications are that it would exacerbate rather than alleviate the existing inequality. What we need instead is some mechanism whereby everyone gets the same standard of care irrespective of how much money they have. Provision of quality health care should be a human right. This is why nationalised healthcare is a good idea, paid for by everyone through taxes.

Most people, even if they claim to be against nationalised healthcare, still accept that pooling of risk is a good idea; most people have some form of insurance for a start. Nationalised healthcare is just that. Pooled risk, paid for through taxation.

My perspective on what is happening at the moment is that we are in an increasingly bullish market, but not quite there yet for alts.

I think bullish sentiment starts with bitcoin, where BTC grows much more quickly that alts - we've had that phase and completed it now.
Later comes the phase where alts increase in price much more quickly than bitcoin, the 'alt season', and this is where I think we are headed.

But right now we are in between the two. We are in a stage where price rises start with alts, but then as soon as alts start to establish some upwards momentum, money goes from alts back to BTC, and BTC rises again. This has happened a lot over the last few weeks.

So should we buy good alts in preference to BTC? I would say that time is coming soon, and we are in the transition between the two, and at the moment good alts and BTC are rising at a similar rate.

XRP has a solid use case, and there is a widely held view that the price has been kept artificially low due to token dumping by Ripple. Indeed many long term holders have been angered at that persistent dumping. Ripple say it is needed to ensure liquidity, which is fair enough, and they are not trying to hide it... however it has kept the price lower than might otherwise be the case.
Ripple have now stopped this regular dumping, so this should in theory unleash XRP and allow it to start rising again over the coming months. The price of XRP is too low for what it is and what it offers.

This can be re-phrased as a long-term vs short-term question.

BSV and BCH are bitcoin forks with a limited (if any) use case. They have to be seen as short-term coins only. Their volatility  (extreme volatility once Craig Wright gets involved) make them good trading coins. That is all.

Etherum is the pre-eminent smart contract platform with a hugely impressive history and solid roadmap, as well as undeniable use case that could have a big transformative effect on society as a whole. Smart contracts are a winner, the only question is will ETH remain the best smart contract coin? (I think yes, but I'll concede the question can't be settled yet.)

That's a risky strategy. I would always pay my taxes rather than have the possibility hanging over me that even years or decades later I would get a huge payment demand from the government. Your choice I suppose, but it is difficult to leave no digital footprints. I imagine it wouldn't take much investigating to uncover that you bought some LTC, and you may then have to explain what happened to it. Just a paranoid example, but what if at some point the government forces the credit card company to disclose details of the people who bought crypto?

Yes, we've hit 9k and it is very encouraging. It's a big milestone, and the question is can we turn it into a support line and hold it? I do think that momentum has been shifting steadily over the last few months. Bearish pullbacks have been short-lived and mostly recovered. Each new push upwards does look more solid than has been the case previously. Just a feeling with zero evidence to back it up, but I think 10k is achievable and any problem of a psychological barrier is overstated.

Yes there are lots of projects running on ETH, but that doesn't mean it's going to increase to a new ATH this year.
I do believe in ETH, and I think we'll see a decent increase as we move slowly towards PoS, but the price in 2017 was an ICO-fuelled boom that I don't think we'll see again.
Slower and steadier I think this year from ETH. I would like to see prices over $1,000, but I would much prefer a slower increase that is sustainable.

Yes, that's my position really. Its price behaviour is that of a shitcoin, and always has been. This trumps any actual merits of the project for me. If it behaves like a pointless scam coin, then it will be treated as such.

ETH is the best smart contract coin by a long way. It has a good future in store, I'm sure, and the move to PoS will play a big part in driving up the price.
But I can't see that 2020 will be ETH's best year ever in terms of price - there's no way we can realistically match what happened at the end of 2017. A price of over $1,000 seems very unlikely this year. ETH does look under-priced, just not that under-priced.

The biggest question for the long-term really is: does it have a use case?
The answer here is a big yes. So as long as they can get everything else right, they have every chance of being a huge success. I would go further and say others such as Waltonchain also have a great chance. Use case is the single most important factor, if you don't have that, then you don't have a long-term future. Of course you need many other things as well, but use case is the most important.