Those are not synonyms actually. That's what I mentioned in the earlier comments (see below):

I tend to agree with you, but not completely though. Financiers (the smart ones) know that "buy when the blood runs on the street", so nobody is gonna buy when BTC reaches new ATHs. And the financiers (again, - not investors) will not want to sit out this rally, unless they have ways to earn risk-free commissions which won't depend on whether Bitcoin goes up or down.

I guess that depends on the country? Because in Russia Telegram is #1 place to get info, news and opinions on crypto-space; in China thats QQ or WeChat; but in the U.S. it seams that you are right - Twitter and YouTube are the go-to choice.

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You are right that commerce and trading (business-like)  people do use BTC, but that's for other purposes. I guess you are right also that anything can happen (but I wouldn't say in 2021 yet).




I wouldn't call financiers less educated I guess. They knew about it from early days, but didn't take it seriously (like with Tesla for example, and other assets too). But we certainly see that attitude changing. But do you think that using crypto-currencies (not only Bitcoin, but potentially others too) is within the scope of their business model?

Well it depends on the perspective we consider - we can always say that anyone can invest anywhere in the end. Even you could invest in complex swaptions if you really want to, but yes it's not that easy. Same with financiers - they can, of course, but do you see HSBC or ICBC investing in Bitcoin any time soon?




If we speak of individuals as financiers, I believe you are very right, however, that's hard to imagine to be done by top global banks as I mentioned above. Do you think they would get involved too?




Yes they are investors, not financiers if we consider that word in a narrow meaning.

You are right, and with the limited BTC supply the price will have to keep raising, until someone decides that it's too high and the final price could clear the market demand/supply. I think those days you are referring to will come pretty soon 

Yes, you are pretty correct with defining the financiers (I would exclude accountants though). But I guess the article was more about the common misconception among people that financiers (banks, etc.) would soon enter the market. Which as you correctly noted too - unlikely to happen, unless they would have customers who want to take that risk, and they could simply transfer the risk from markets to customers, and lock themselves into the risk-free spreads.

True and not. It might seam so from the external actions which we all can observe and judge it based on our own limited understanding. However, we will never know the full story or the full motives & reasons. We might be failing to see the bigger picture, or might be thinking too much and most of those things were accidental and not on purpose. Therefore, I, personally never judge people before I can be sure that I really understand every single part of them. Otherwise, whatever we assume is just an assumption based on the news that we were fed with by the public media, and nothing more.

Dear BitcoinTalk Community, we are pleased to share with you some of the most important milestones of as.exchange in 2020.

You are among the first ones to get to know about this




•   1,763 registered users
•   ~$1,010,000 total traded volume
•   ~$3,750,000 total open interest
•   ¥700,000 invested by private investors
•   ¥200,000 total committed by private investors for 2021Q1
•   $5,000,000 committed by large VC for next round
•   20+ financial products in our R&D pipeline, most of which to be launched in 2021

See more details at: as.exchange News

This has been achieved since going live on December 5, 2020. More to come soon. Thank you all for your support and interest!

Well, of course we can say that anything is possible in this world. Some time ago people couldn't also imagine using mobile phones or driving cars as well. But do you objectively believe that Fed, ECB, PBC, BOJ, etc. would give up their power of money control to something they don't control and cannot print as much as needed / when needed?

As for Investment Banks (GS, MS, JPM, etc.) sure, same applies to Merchant Banks - that's entirely different business model. They are investors (sometimes), and advisors to others mostly. Their end goal of business is to "sell" - whether it's a corporation in M&A deal, stocks in IPO, or something else (and also collect the fee irrespective of the success , but it's not money processing like commercial banks).

I believe you are referring to the specific group of financiers - investors. Just like PayPal, Visa, or NASDAQ cannot be called investors (apart from their dedicated VC teams), overall they are in different business, which is not the same with Black Stone, or Sequoia Capital. Same could apply to HSBC, Citi or ICBC. Some are moving funds/capital/money and processing them by earning their transaction revenue irrespective of currency/asset market price, while others intentionally make bets that what they buy-in is currently underpriced and they can earn their risk premium in the future when the currency/asset will be fairly priced.




Absolutely correct point. Banks need to handle deposits which are fixed in USD/whatever currency, while BTC can go up/down any moment by 10-20-30% which will be an unbearable risk for them and will result in bank run. Of course they can hedge the risk away, but there will be such issues as: 1) when fully hedged - you don't earn any profit at all, 2) with BTC current market size, they might be not able to hedge to the extend they would want to.


Yes, with this I fully agree. From common understanding perspective and more of "philosophical" perspective, the word "financier" typically refers literally to anyone who is working with money, be it asset manager, hedge fund, bank, FX broker, stock broker, local exchange down the street, Treasury department, VISA processing the payments, or literally anyone - just a very general term. From another perspective, there are subdivisions in the world of financiers, and "financier" (who earns processing/transaction/maturity/liquidity fees) is another subdivision of the general "financier" (which does include investors, exchanges, lenders, brokers, including Grayscale, MicroStrategy's treasury dep., etc.).

I agree that BTC price is volatile, however, it's not a clear thing that "in the long run its value is sure to go up". It really depends on the investment time-frame. If 10-20 years is the long-term - then yes, definitely, if it's the real long-term 100-500 years - then I wouldn't be so sure.




Yes, you are correct, however, there have been precedents among certain states of shutting down internet and electricity (if we exclude the post-apocalyptical scenario). But generally I tend to agree with you.




That's the common understanding of Bitcoin btw in the market. Just very illustrative of how majority sees it I would say 60% admit they see it like that, 30% say they really believe in Bitcoin, but actually don't want to admit that they are part of those 60%, and probably on the rest of 10% are the actual believers.




Do you mean gold and diamonds? So you do admit that under the extreme stress-testing only the few things/assets will be left valuable which were tested for thousands of years, unlike the currently dominant or overhyped ones?

You are very correct, but they usually don't like to take risk which they cannot estimate and carefully manage. As you correctly said - very calculative people, who take well accounted-for risks to earn profits (mostly arbitrage). But yes, if BTC can be de-risked (typically done via derivatives), then they might start using it too.




I don't think trading in Bitcoins is harder than trading swaps or structured products, or even planes (I used to know one person from Deutsche Bank who literally was trading planes like we trade Bitcoins:D). But you made a great point - for the top ones, it's too small to care about. People who scream that BTC is impossible to ignore, just fail to realize the size of capital markets and the relative size of BTC for now. Once it grows to the big enough cap - they will enter, until then - VCs and speculators, or the small ones will try to take advantage.

From my personal perspective, financiers are also investors. But just like hedge fund invests but rather than entering equity of company / or purchasing asset they do it via debt instruments. Banks and money institutions also collect money from others (depositors), just like hedge funds do so with their LPs. Due to this part I do agree with you. However, if we consider money transmission business as it is (payment processing), or exchanges - they don't necessarily take others' money to make more money. They simply provide infrastructure for investors and don't care that much if the underlying assets go up or down - they just live on transaction fees and revenues.

As for institutions that invested in Bitcoin, yes you are correct, and from my personal perspective, some of them are quite reliable (not MicroStrategy though), but they are all eventually investors, but not financiers (i.e. HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, ICBC, CMB, Sberbank or those guys). Thus, while we do observe entrance of institutional investors, we can't say (yet?) entrance of institionals in the broad term, or financiers specifically.

While banks do deal in assets in the end, they never actually take the actual asset risks, because they (here I agree with the author of that post) eventually just "borrow long-term, lend short term" and if they are not sure they are able to hedge all risks and leave only transaction revenue for themselves - they will not enter the deal.




Sure, the source is here (it's in Russian originally): https://t.me/blockbitnews/968 Didn't post initially as didn't want to get the thread removed due to advertisement (it's not).

As for investors and financiers being the same, unfortunately I cannot agree on that. Bank's business is borrow long-term from CB/depositors @ cheap rates, and lend short-term @ high rates. From philosophical perspective - yes, they do both make money from other people's money - that's true, but the business models are different. One is like Uber - connects those with assets with the ones who need assets and earn their margin, but another one is like traditional taxi car - buy the cars hire drivers and wish that can earn money from that.

And about the investors losing money vs financiers not losing money, I guess the author of the initial article didn't state that clearly, but yes, investors will lose due to market price risks, financiers - will never! Financiers will lose due to risk mismanagement, due to failed operations, or liquidity mismatch, and there are million other risks, but not the price risks purposely taken by investors. If you see a bank failing, that's very unlikely due to taking price risk (unlike investors), but due to poor risk management and/or failed risk transfer as this is the only and core business line of all financiers - transfer risks from one party to another one, earn the spread for doing so, and with the earned spread cover own operational costs.

Dear BitcoinTalk Community, we appreciate those of you who already started using as.exchange. It's our pleasure that you are able to trade and already started taking advantage of the new financial product to manage Bitcoin price risks!

For the greater growth and service, we would like to kindly ask your all opinion of those who already use or is considering to use as.exchange: what are the things you think every new exchange must have in order for you to consider it reliable and trustworthy?

Partially we internally know, partially thanks to earlier responses we understand that you would like the new exchange to:
1) Be listed in trackers such as CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, etc. (will be done in 2021)
2) Be covered my news media (in progress)
3) Have team shown (done here on earlier pages of thread)
4) Have reputable VC backing (in progress)

Is there anything else which you think is a MUST in order to let you believe that an exchange like us, or anyone else is truly reliable and is not among those who launch daily like mushrooms for the purpose of stealing users' deposits?

Any advise, suggestion or comment is very welcome and highly appreciated

You are absolutely correct! This is part of mind-set that differentiates successful people from the failed ones. Also there's a saying "smart man learns from own mistakes, wise man learns from mistakes of others". Yet, learning here doesn't mean paying money which you could invest otherwise, for something you can get free of charge from google.

You are very correct. In regard to the current challenge of China too - it excelled in copying the most effective economies and businesses and improving those, but still has to learn how to innovate internally.




I don't see WWIII happening - the thread to the entire humanity is too significant. However, I don't see how China's predatory and expansionist mentality is different from the one of US recently, and before that from UK and other EU-countries? Moreover, you probably do know that China did have democracy long time ago - it was tested, implemented and studied very well there. The result wasn't pleasant. And now we have the example of other failing democracies. Furthermore, you need to take into consideration the total population. With nearly 1.5bn. people each having all the tools for self-expression and hyping own ideas what will happen with the country?

Also as a side note, I lived in USA for several years, and in China as well. And I can personally assure you - you can come to China and you will see that you got waaaay more freedom there in terms of personal life, business, opportunities available and which you can take, what you can do, etc., etc. as compared to the U.S. Of course if you start posing thread to the security of society - you gonna get in deep troubles (same with US), but overall being a regular human - you will have much more freedom and safety.