I'm not going to convince anyone. I have been here for too long so as not to get into this kind of thing, that is meaningless discussions. We are talking about "built-in mechanic", while central banks and governments expanding money supply have nothing to do with that as they are an external factor and therefore outside the scope of the question. You see, it is not so much about me making "cryptic remarks" as about you failing to remain within the domain boundaries. Violating these basic assumptions and premises makes the whole argument pointless, so you are on your own here, as I have already said.

Yes, this is the way things are in the world. But I don't see how we can exist without fiat today. People had already been using gold and silver as money for a few millenia, and in the end it caused an incessant sequence of economic crises which ultimately ended in the world war (1914). Anyway, I don't think that you would want to get sent back in time like in the 11th century, with no fiat around and nothing else as well which makes your life so comfortable and cushy today. So be cautious of your desires as you don't know what you're bringing into fruition.

Fame and glory (as you call it) are also inseparably and inherently linked to prosperity. So even in such matters money plays an important role, though it is clear that in most such cases it is secondary and comes as a nice bonus. But there's one thing which is greater than money itself, and it is called power, as I've written about that in another thread here.

When you have power, like that of a dictator, you don't need money anymore as you can take everything directly, whether it can be bought with money or not. Unsurprisingly, you can't buy power with money as it is worth a way more than money can ever buy. In this fashion, people who are looking for power are not interested in money as money for them can be only a tool or a means, among many others, not a goal.

Fiat money already exists mostly in digital form, and in some countries like Denmark or Sweden (not sure here), they are going to remove paper banknotes and coins from circulation altogether within a certain period. So creating fiat in the majority of cases doesn't require anything "material", technically speaking. Besides, modern paper money is made from cotton (and linen), not from wood as many mistakenly continue to think. Though I agree that it is a complicated process but definitely not because of "special raw materials". There is nothing special about cotton.

If you can't explain something in simple terms and a few sentences, you don't understand it yourself as good as you think you do, end of story. What I mentioned is not my claim, it is a textbook example which shows that you don't really understand anything from the ground up. Economics starts with particular individuals, households, and separate businesses, but of course, that doesn't interest you. Now imagine how it feels when you refer me to the works of Nobel prize winners while I refer you to a textbook (why deflation is not inflation negated), and you don't even have a clue what I'm talking about. Just in case, I can explain it in a couple of sentences.

You are acting like someone who read a highly abstract book or two without having any idea or understanding how things work at the lowest level. But I can offer you some comfort as you are definitely not alone in this guileless effort.

What do you mean by "real functioning of the economy"? It is generally accepted that any advanced economy, where advanced is anything beyond a simple subsistence economy, money is a must-have, as it were. In a subsistence economy you don't really need money and can get along with barter as it doesn't introduce division of labor other than hunting, gathering, and agriculture. Anything else needs money, and modern economies need fiat as money because money based on hard assets will be ineffective in so complex economies.


You may need to finish school, really. And learn about the forms in which money exists today. Central banks and governments on their own can't "expand the money supply" as it will only cause inflation, price inflation. Hint, you may want to read about endogenous money supply.

But Bitcoin has been the same since its inception for most practical intents and purposes, right? So how exactly do you define "as long as it does not cross the illegal border"? As I see it, it is not and will never be Bitcoin's fault if it "crosses" that illegal border. This border is not defined by Bitcoin, whether it is legal or illegal is defined by neither the community not the devs behind Bitcoin. It is defined by people who essentially have nothing to do with Bitcoin other than declaring it "illegal". Which is to say, who is actually crossing the borders here?

If there is no active involvement of government in such matters, either positive or negative, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will likely reach a level of saturation after a while where it will be staying for many years to come. It will take its niche as a specific means of payment and investment or speculation vehicle, mostly in the Internet, but it won't be able to undermine fiat as an established currency, the one which is actively used for payment everywhere. There will be a certain sphere of application, a crypto economy of sorts, with borders, but it will be limited.

I think this is the most realistic scenario.

Also, if you couple this approach with selling, say, 50% (or even less) of what you bought at the dips, when the price turns in your favor for a while, you will bring the breakeven price down faster, and at the same time not lose an opportunity to have long-term profits (with a small trade-off). But there's a caveat. With crypto, we never know where the true bottom is, and if you think that $160 was the absolute minimum, you may have to rethink your stance if the price crashes past that mark in a free-fall fashion.

I'm tremendously curious who and how exactly established that paper money is "the most optimal way of financial settlements between individuals and legal entities over the past centuries". Paper money itself has been around only for a couple of centuries, so what do you mean by the past centuries, how many of them precisely? And I wouldn't call it the optimal way. Personally, I'm quite happy with cashless transactions without discriminating between individuals and "legal entities".

That method may be not working anymore. Cryptocurrencies are mostly speculative assets, and they had been growing until the market became saturated. It became saturated as no new money was thrown in, and then prices expectedly crashed because most people involved in crypto were there exclusively for profit motives. In other words, holding was one of the most popular methods to make money in crypto while crypto was rising for so many months.

But these days may be over. In the majority of established markets, both purely financial and related to commodities, holding is meaningless, and you can only earn something by actively using your brains (if you have them), not by sitting idly on your hands waiting until the price rises enough to let you grab easy profits. This was a unique opportunity, and I'm not sure it is going to present itself again in the future.

This is not as bad as it sounds, though having a bot for placing orders is certainly a preferred way of scalping. Doing it the manual way is very exhausting and time consuming, so I can't really imagine a human being practicing this approach regularly. The strategy in this case is very simple in its premises. You just have to follow the trend and place stop-losses and take-profits accordingly. In the end, it doesn't matter how many losing trades you make as long as your net financial result remains positive.

Of course, in real life it is not that simple as simple bots get massively exploited by more advanced bots and the latter by truly sophisticated ones, leaving the owners of the simpler bots with losses in the long run. But it is definitely doable if you have enough experience in the required fields, that is in trading itself and in writing trading bots.

Let me see if I can answer your question. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies had been rising since September 2016 with a couple minor, short-lived corrections. Any way you slice it, It was easy money. You could buy at any price and then just sit on your hands patiently waiting till the price had risen enough to let you book handsome profits. That lasted for over a year, so don't get surprised there were a lot of people involved in that activity of doing nothing. It pisses off not only you but also many other people across the forum as holdlers were profiting off the people who actually had been adding value to Bitcoin, at their expense. But now many of those holdlers seem to have fallen a victim to their own stratagem having been left holding the bag. Actually, plenty of bags.

I cannot say that I completely disagree with your point as it definitely has some substance to back it up. With that said, however, we often overestimate our abilities and thus overstretch ourselves, then become frustrated and disappointed with our underperformance (as we come to think), lose interest as a result, and ultimately arrive at the conclusion that it is not our thing at all. While in reality we just need to move slowly in the chosen direction and do not make rush decisions. The undisputed boxing champions like Mike Tyson or Lennox Lewis, they all started their professional boxing careers by fighting so-called journeymen, who typically have adequate skills but still not quite on par with future title contenders. This gives prospects the ring experience they lack but without risking their boxing career too much if they chose to fight a top-notch boxer right at the very beginning.

So you want to say that if the buy fast and sell fast thing failed, then the long term thing will not? To me, it looks more like a poor man's hope. Just sitting with your coins curled in a fetus position and waiting nervously for something which might not happen at all is not a good idea on its own and definitely not better than trying to purposefully do something. Actually, trying to change things for the better should be a preferred strategy at all times unless you know for certain that patiently waiting is the best strategy given the circumstances.

You seem to love money so much that you even capitalized that word, wow. I'm not going to be a hypocrite here either but it looks like you are putting the cart before the horse here. It is not money that makes you influential, in real life it is other way around. You have money because you are influential. As they say, at first publicity, then prosperity. Money cannot buy power, power is the ultimate thing on the scale of material values, and it can only be taken by force or otherwise, not bought directly (though money can definitely help you with that).

This has been known since Ancient Rome, and no amount of money could prevent you from being proscribed when things came to that. In fact, the more money you had, the higher were your chances to be declared an enemy of the state, for example, in the times of mass proscription under Sulla, a Roman dictator.

Actually, no one is particularly interested in the common good as everyone is after their own interests, obviously. And elites are no exception to this rule. You speak of them like they are aliens, while in reality they are essentially the same people only in a position which gives them a feeling or sense of superiority.

In essence, when I said they are interested in the common good over the long term, I meant they are of course interested in their own well-being before anything else. But they also understand (well, at least some of them) that their prosperity is inseparably linked to the prosperity of the whole society as they depend on it more than on anything else and more than everyone else does. The point is that to support their high standards of living, they have to rely on the whole society as their feeding ground, and thus they have to care for it.


Does it mean that elites dismantling the gold standard was the good thing for the public as there is no more "'moral honor of the elites" in the form of paper money redemption for gold?


You talk of them as if they really were aliens. Seen the V television series? Indeed, they are protecting their personal interests, but so does everyone else. So what's the point? This is not Lalaland.

And what does that tell us? In my opinion, it tells us that most people are fully aware all other coins are not really much better than the cryptoking. Bitcoin, even despite its well-known shortcomings such as slow confirmation times and high transaction costs does its job pretty well. Some coins are faster (like Litecoin), some have special features (like Ethereum), but people need a reliable and trusted currency which does what a currency should minimally do, that is transfer value. I don't personally believe in Bitcoin as digital gold as gold is a totally different beast, but Bitcoin fits well where fiat currencies fail, first of all, at being independent from the whims of governments and other third parties (for example, banks).

I agree with your point and like your post, especially the part about saving the sermon. Any way you look at it, it is better to cry in a Cadillac than on a bus. On the other hand, money is not everything when you already have enough of it as you rightfully noted. When all your basic needs and necessities are satisfied (like shelter, food, water), you start to care about other things which are less tied to the possession of sufficient amount of money, things like hobbies, relationships, children, societal things, etc. So let me sum it up for you. Money is not everything but it is definitely a large part of it.

You forget that today you can sell as easily as buy. Many crypto exchanges today allow selling borrowed coins. Selling borrowed funds with an expectation of future price fall is called shorting, while the whole process is called margin trading. In this way, we could rightfully reverse the thread title, and then it would read sell fast and buy back fast. When shorting, selling fast and buying back as fast is the only option as shorts are very dangerous. They can easily wipe your account balance clean with one sharp move of the price.