Anything that doesn't compose the base of Exter's pyramid is a fucking altcoin.

(hint: bitcoin doesn't occupy the base of Exter's pyramid and never will because it's impossible for it to compete with metals as a store of value)

The funny part is that China has taken control of both the bitcoin and metals market.  The western bankers (like JP Morgan) kept trying to naked short silver down as low as they could but they were forced to stop by the Chinese when there was a $2 spread between the east and west with $15.80 US and $17.80 China.  Now they are reversing their attempts to dump silver because it's just not possible and it's all profits on the long  bull run up from here forth.

The Chinese govt will not divide us.....from silver going up

The way forward is to not attempt to stabilize it and let all the ponzis implode because nobody is going to open a business or invest in anything at the top of peak scam, and then we can have some type of sound money like gold and silver afterwards.

The ETF date is the most interesting part about bitcoin at the moment.  As a regulator you would have to be insane to approve a bitcoin ETF in current state, so if it did get approved it would probably be the government trying to create some alternative target for people to waste their time in and keep them out of the metals markets.  When the current scam system starts to implode, gold will go to at least $20,000 an ounce in current buying power and silver will see even higher percentage gains.  The sooner people figure this out, the faster it does implode - which is why they don't want people creating bull runs in those markets and want to distract people with other things instead.

Someone is going to get all upset that I implied bitcoin is somehow not as good as metals, but by that I just mean that it's very likely metals will have a currency roll again or that the world reserve currency will be metals, while it's very unlikely a nation state or the world reserve currency would be bitcoin.  In fact, it would be a disaster since bitcoin isn't fungible with every transaction traced with white and black lists making it a permissioned ledger in that aspect.  Until/if that issue is resolved, nobody should be wishing for the government or wall street to have any affiliation with bitcoin whatsoever when the odds of it turning into some 1984 scheme are far higher than not.

This is nonsense IMO.  You don't defeat r-selection populations by becoming an r-selection population yourself.  Earth is generally overpopulated in terms of sustainability and k-selection populations are naturally going to taper down to compensate.  They will reproduce more when there is actually an abundance of space, resources, and reason to.  It is not a permanent death spiral.  K-individuals are not going to have 4 kids while living inside a tiny apartment somewhere with no means to support them.

It seems obvious K-selection populations never could have existed in the past without using strategies of going to war against or containing r-selection populations/isolating themselves against them.  That is what will happen in the future as well.  The "soft-warfare" against r-selection populations started long ago with innocuous tactics such as "white flight", but will eventually ramp up into full scale warfare as certain groups act as white people stalkers - following whites around and demanding free welfare or violence if they don't give in to subsidize their dysfunctional r-lifestyle.




Gotta love this quote:

"From a compendium of sources, the average crustal abundance of both metals is around 4 ppb. Based
solely on this fact, platinum and gold should trade at about the same price."

Yet going by this logic, silver is coming out of the ground at only a 9:1 ratio to gold, so silver would be vastly more undervalued using his logic and there would be no reason to talk about platinum at all.  

I see

Well, my $1148 gold position feels good.  Feels good man.

The plan was always to let the so called benefits of the world reserve currency ride out to max length and import actual goods and resources while exporting useless paper and then replace it with metals when it can't go on any longer.  So yea, of course it will be worse than 2008, or different rather.  The government is going to honor social security, so all those people will be fine, but I have no idea about those pensions that are locked up in stocks.  All I know is, once they default on the debt, gold will probably be in the $20,000-$25,000 an ounce range, and silver should see even higher percentage gains.

I miss the good old days when a Chinaman would pump the price by $20 to attract momentum traders then immediately dump it $100.

Mat, this wouldn't happen to be you would it?

https://www.reddit.com/r/fscomeau/comments/5qj64l/well_this_is_it_going_allin_my_last_stand_my/

Yea, just like it's "impossible" to stop people from using gold, right?  Sounds "impossible" to do so on paper, right?  Well, they were able to do it, and bitcoin is far easier to stop.  

Bitcoin's value isn't even currently derived from point of sale being a settlement layer and all since it doesn't scale to point of sale use, meaning it's value is entirely derived from how much you can dump it for at an exchange.  So just by shutting down a few exchanges you can already kill the value of bitcoin in current state.  Yes, LN is supposed to change that, but whether LN will work or not in a decentralized manner is another topic.

Please, spare me the bullshit.  The "state" banned gold use in America for a long ass time and Bitcoin is far easier for the state to ban or co-opt.  It's the easiest target in the world for the state to take over or demolish.  Stopping the use of metals is a far more monumental task and they were even able to accomplish that.  People pretending bitcoin is immune to the state are the biggest fucking fools in the world.

Yea, no.

November 7, 2008: "Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years" - Satoshi

Notice it says "several years" and not decades or "forever" and that was already 8 years ago.

It's really a binary outcome.  An anonymous, fungible currency would probably cause the collapse of the state, while one that isn't fungible or anonymous would likely be utilized as a tool to create a police state.

Point you to the central authority?  Probably the same central authority that shut down Liberty Reserve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve

Do you really think bitcoin transcends all form of national govt?  I told you exactly what's going to happen already.  The government will create a fixed address alias system wrapper that goes around bitcoin and force you to use it or be considered a criminal launderer, similar to how they tried with chain anchor already.  After everyone is onboarded, they will then divorce the system away from the native bitcoin unit and into their own "government coin" where they can automatically pillage any money they want.  It also helps them ban cash in the process.

This is why you see them going nuts trying to suppress metals at all costs while they don't care at all if bitcoin goes up.  They want you to use bitcoin because they know how easy it is for them to co-opt it or ban it.  When you use Coinbase right now they threaten to delete your account for sending bitcoin to a gambling site.  They track where all the money goes.  Not using Coinbase doesn't help.  Bitcoin isn't fungible while also being totally traced and monitored, so that kind of police state is going to happen no matter how and where you attempt to use bitcoin.  

I kinda figured being completely traceable bitcoin would have that type of fate someday in the future but I thought it would be years from now.  In reality, the bitcoin police state is already here.  Mixing in the future will also be a crime known as "laundering".  I'm aware nobody in this thread actually cares about anything besides trying to make money in pump and dumps, but Ted Kaczynski was right and increasing implementation of technology always leads to loss of freedom.  If you actually wanted freedom you would be using metals.

Why not 0?

You just said in another thread like 2 days ago that "bitcoin is going to $600".  Are you pulling an Armstrong on us?


lol

You're just being irrationally biased now.  Everyone knows metals are more fungible, more anti-fragile, and less counter party risk.  This means Bitcoin can never dethrone metals as a store of value or hope to compete with them on Exter's pyramid.  If you're acting as a settlement layer, you're attempting to compete with metals as a store of value and Bitcoin CANNOT do it.  This means Bitcoin has to derive value more from raw transaction flow and being a payment processor instead.  

This is why I think Bitcoin probably doesn't have a value proposition without large scaling.  The lightning network claims to be able to do that, but I'm not convinced it can do so in a decentralized manner when economy of scale already forces centralization in the base bitcoin network in the first place.  Bitcoin did not "solve" the decentralization problem.   Bitcoin is a centralization problem waiting for someone to solve it.

As for solving that centralization problem, to do so you would likely need to engineer it so it's impossible to practice usury in bitcoin.  The only way I can think of to do that is either unprofitable PoW (which probably can't work in practice), or by some really exotic system of decentralized captchas where anyone attempting to solve blocks requires manual human intervention and can't be automated on cruise control via CPUs as I talked about in the thread below.

You cannot have decentralization without engineering bitcoin so automated usury is impossible

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1700073.0

Whether you believe "god" is a person, quantum fluctuation, whatever, metals are a blockchain created by "god"; bitcoin is a blockchain created by people.  The blockchain created by people can never compete because it will always have more flaws or side channel attacks that render it useless.  I have a feeling anything blockchain related will forever be a Rube Goldberg machine that claims to accomplish some type of task, but in reality fails to accomplish that task (decentralization) while doing it an extremely complicated manner.

On a linear timeline, do you suppose we will discover aliens first or the release of anonymint coin?