He is right though even if that wasn't perhaps his best take.  You should be able to send someone money without it being recorded by someone else.  Anonymity was important in the US in 1776 when they were fighting the British and is just as important today:  without being able to fund speech that someone might disagree with, you have little free speech.  

Look at the US where the President had payment processors shut off because the powers that be disagreed with him.  If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone and everyone if they have an unpopular opinion.  

The EU is a surveillance state and no friend of liberty.

They are being shortsighted.  Keep your fees high and see billions leave or make them competitive and keep the assets.  Seems like an easy decision if you are intending to remain in the business for long term.

It "could" or it "could not". 

The question is demand.  Outflows from GBTC were a lot the last few days.  More than inflows at other ETFs.  Their fees are insanely high compared to others so that isn't a surprise.  What is a surprise is that they didn't cut their fees to be competitive with the others.  A question in my mind is how much of the outflow from GBTC is going to go into others.  And once the outflows from GBTC stop or slow down, will other demand remain similar to it now?

Really, that's all it boils down to:  what is the demand and what is the supply.

Duh.  Only someone really ignorant about bitcoin could think that needed to be cleared up.  It is, and has always been, clear that the halving cuts "new supply" - e.g. the bitcoins that are awarded for a mined block.

That is the difference between gold and bitcoin:  if the price goes high enough for gold, there are lots of other sources that can increase the supply indefinitely here on earth and in the solar system.  Bitcoin's supply is guaranteed to be finite, gold's is subject to increasing supply due to an increased price.  Some studies say hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of gold in the ocean that would be recoverable at a high enough price.  While there are reasons gold has been valuable for so long, there is certainly a non-finite supply of gold at the right price. 

If bitcoin goes to $1,000,000/coin there is no way to get more supply. 

Schiff has had some insightful comments in the past, but he has a huge blind spot for bitcoin.

My thoughts are that based on just US ETF inflows since January, my mental math says they alone are collecting about 8 X new supply at US$72000, per week.  And so 16 X new supply post halving.  That would mean equilibrium is 8-16 X the price now, assuming ETF demand stays constant.  That doesn't include other non-ETF demand which is more difficult to measure.  So once those willing to sell at each price level dries up the price has to increase to get anyone else to sell.

You'd think people would clue in that even ignoring the halving the supply/demand curve seems to be way out of whack and they should remove their coins from the market, but I guess not yet.  Prices are set at the margin so it doesn't take much more demand or slightly less available supply to significantly increase the fiat price which is why we are seeing right now.

So that is why smart people are still investing.  Of course we've been hearing "tulips" and "bubble" and the same nonsense for 14-15 years so there are plenty of people who don't seem to have clued in or are purposefully carrying water for the fiat-inflation-loving statists.

If their explanation is correct, it seems very shortsighted to me.  Based on just US ETF inflows since January, my mental math says they alone are collecting about 8 X new supply at US$72K per week.  And so 16 X new supply post halving.  That would mean equilibrium is 8-16 X the price now - assuming ETF demand stays constant.  And that doesn't include other non-ETF demand which is more difficult to measure.  So once those willing to sell at these prices dries up the price has to increase to get anyone else to sell.  You'd think people would clue in even ignoring the halving, but I guess not yet.  Prices are set at the margin so it doesn't take much more demand or slightly less available supply to significantly increase the fiat price.

And that ignores any additional demand, e.g. from institutional investors and retail investors who don't have access (e.g. those at vanguard, ml.com etc).

No one knows.  If history is any guide and if you have patience then it is a fine time to buy, particularly with the halving coming up in a few weeks.  The time to buy is when you can because you never know when you will need bitcoin.

Plenty of people did, see below about the people who got the potential for bitcoin, plenty of people didn't, but there were plenty of people who understood in 2010 and 2011 that bitcoin was going to be worth a whole lot of very little and that it was something of a binary out coming.  As time progresses, one way increases in likelihood more and more.


But the negative comments related to bitcoin in some of these are just golden, and are still repeated now, nearly 14 years later, see e.g.:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12156.0

https://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/06/bitcoin-is-economic-singularity.html

https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/bitcoin-releases-version-03



Things like this from tomhudson on slashdot:
"... except I didn't have to even read that to figure out the system was insecure. The description from Wikipedia was sufficient. In other words, if someone who is not familiar with the system can spot the main flaw in 2 minutes or less, then it's garbage.  ...
Summary: Bitcoin is worthless."


AC: "So it's slashvertising AND garbage. Three cheers for kdawson"

"The first thing the client did was try to connect to a webserver on port 80, probably a version check. The second thing it did was try to connect to a an IRC network. Can you say, botnet?"


"I see no reason this would be preferable to any number of already-available systems for valuing goods (like, say, US dollars), unless you're an anti-government paranoid."

When new supply goes from 900/day to 450/day and if demand remains constant then it could go quite high.  Adding in additional demand from investors for the ETFs (many RIA's don't even have them on their platform, nor do some brokers (e.g. ml edge which is large) will only drive demand higher and with new supply cut in half...

So, could it go to 200k?  Yes, will it?  Who knows  :-)

Of course no one knows, but plenty of people can look at demand vs new supply and new uses and see where the trend could easily go.  I saw an article earlier about RIAs and investors at many places not having access to the US ETFs so one could easily see that having that access will only increase demand and having it coincident with the upcoming halving will only steepen the fiat price curve.

It is a transition.  Right now it is more of an investment with other use cases included.  Once bitcoin reaches an equilibrium with fiat pricing then it will be much easier to use as digital cash.  That is another few orders of magnitude away and at that point (if not before) one hopes that you don't need to "get out" of bitcoin and can just remain in without needing gatekeepers to convert.

Chavez implemented the communist/socialist dream and got the logical results even with a huge amount of oil reserves.  You are right though, Chavez destroyed what was once the wealthiest country in Central and South America.  It can happen anywhere and the degree of the destruction is proportional to the degree to which anti-freedom policies are implemented.  As far as Bukele goes, I guess time will tell.

It is odd that they had to write an article about this and research to find the answer.  Anyone paying attention should know it. lol.

And you are right, do people really think that you can't cash out if you want to?  It would be nice if one didn't have to cash out of course.

It is sad because a lot of people had the opportunity and had the opportunity to be patient and yet failed to do so.  It is pretty funny though that we still hear the same nonsense though, "it is tulips", "it is a ponzi", "it will crash", "it doesn't have a use" etc.  I suspect that in another 10 years there will be still people saying similar things.  Likewise, 10-14 years ago, yes, there was a larger chance bitcoin could fail, a lot big chance that bitcoin would take the "worth very little" path as opposed to the "worth a lot" path.  Every year since then the chance that bitcoin would be worth very little in fiat terms has decreased whereas the opposite has increased.

I told a lot of people they should just put a few hundred or a few thousand dollars in bitcoin between 2010 and 2013 with similar arguments:  at worst you'd lose your initial money and at best you'd do really well.  It was a great example of an asymmetric risk / reward. 

After PayPal, Stripe etc cut off some Trump related entities from them back in Jan 2021, e.g. unbanked them he should be embracing it.  A censorship resistant form of money helps everyone avoid the fascist authoritarian tendencies of many of the left who want to cut people they disagree with off from the financial system.  

If those types of entities are willing to cut off the President of the United States and a billionaire at that, no one else is safe.

Excessive fees like some ETFs initially announced are unsustainable.  Thankfully competition is helping to get them down which helps people who are locked in to the old ETFs due to embedded capital gains.

And this is somewhat meaningless.  It is up now.  Look at the long term trend and if you are patient if the trend continues, you'll be rewarded.  Short term fluctuations are pretty much just grist for click-bait articles.

Trading is difficult unless you are trying to arbitrage or front run or something.  Holding is the safest way.  Sure some people will make money trading but many won't.

There are plenty of catalysts for the increase in fiat price: inflation, ETF approval, upcoming halving etc.  If this halving is like previous ones, there could be a drop in the short time after it, as people unload what they purchased in anticipation (buy the rumor, sell the news) followed by an increase upwards. 

This time could be different though because from what I've read many miners have sold a lot of "inventory" already due to the ETF approvals.  Plus with US ETFs (among many things) fueling demand there may be enough demand that with the decreased supply there isn't an opportunity to drop.

I think the answer is: no one knows, but we'll all guess lol

Yes, patience is key.  Pretty much anyone who has mined or bought bitcoin in the last 15+ years has made a profit - with the exception of a few weeks and those people are close to breakeven.  

It has been pretty easy to do well with bitcoin but patience and lack of panic has been the enemy of many.  Another enemy was those who believed the nonsense about it being a scam, tulips, "rat poison squared" etc.  I remember reading comments when I first read about it on slashdot saying things like, "well, I'll just copy the block chain and private keys and double my money."  Talk about a whoosh moment of incomprehension (that was July 2010).   Another enemy of many has been inertia and not doing anything. I told people about it at Thanksgiving 2010, and many times thereafter, including tech people and many people did nothing or procrastinated or "didn't have the money" to put $50 or $500 into it or the desire or "time" to set up a miner (back when CPU and GPU were options).  Pretty much everyone I told could've gotten $50 or $500 quite easily.

My advice has been the same all along:  buy or mine some. If you aren't going to use it, then move it to cold storage and leave it.

Is it guaranteed?  No, but the binary choice of it being worth a lot or very little increases the likelihood of the "a lot" every day and every new use.