This has essentially devolved into a chicken and egg discussion. Because you couldn't win the point against the notion that market utility is what causes wealth (as opposed to some of your earlier assertions, like it's caused by luck or caused by money, which failed to recognize that money is just a representation of wealth and not the actual cause of wealth), you're now trying to undermine the market utility argument by claiming that the only way you can create market utility is through luck. It's a ridiculous argument to make. It completely ignores ingenuity as any kind of force in the market. You might as well be saying that there's no point in trying to do anything in the marketplace because it's completely random and winners and losers are determined by chance. When you take that argument to its logical conclusion, you realize what a ridiculous point it is.

No matter how many times you end a paragraph with "end of story," it doesn't make your points any stronger. It looks like an attempt to claim an authority your points are completely failing to establish.

Regardless of what the price is doing at this point, you can cherry-pick your sources to reinforce whatever you want to believe about what the price is going to do. There is no shortage of articles claiming Bitcoin is on the way down of a fad cycle, and likewise the opposite, no shortage of articles claiming we're on the verge of another massive bull run just waiting to bust out. Nobody really has any credibility when it comes to predicting. The causes are far too complex to really have a firm grasp what is driving price movements. It's too speculative, and too much irrationality is driving trading activity.

Why would anyone assume that everyone in the world wants to own bitcoin, or eventually will? It just doesn't follow logically. These types of posts seem to share the same logical fallacy as the ones I've seen on this board that claim that there will never be enough bitcoins for every millionaire who wants one to have one. Although technically true, it's also meaningless because the conclusion the people hawking this stat want you to draw is that if you have one bitcoin, you will eventually be incredibly wealthy because the millionaires will want to buy it off you and will have to pay insane prices due to lack of supply. That makes no sense at all. First, bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places; second, there is no shortage of substitute cryptos that can be used in place of bitcoin; third, it doesn't make sense to conclude that all millionaires will want bitcoins and are too shortsighted to buy them now. People get so blinded by their hypothetical future wealth that they stop paying attention reality and no longer employ critical thinking. 

I'd be weary of making a habit of doing the opposite of what billionaires are doing. There's a reason they are billionaires and you are not. Intentionally doing the opposite of them seems like a bad idea. If a billionaire is making a financial decision, they probably know more about it than you do. If billionaires were fleeing bitcoin (and to be clear, there's no evidence to suggest that's the case), you'd probably be smarter to follow them rather than try to stand defiantly in their way.

His assets and track record are his biggest asset. He's known as an honest person and someone for whom integrity matters. (Tangentially, it's why his continued support for Wells Fargo is such a big deal, because his continued investment in Wells Fargo after their repeated scandals and lies is a very big departure from his reputation, but I digress...) Buffet doesn't really have political connections in as much as the government was desperate to find people to inject money into financial institutions and Buffet had the money to do so, was known to be an honest guy, and was not unfamiliar with banking deals, as I believe he was involved with some major bank deals around the 1980s. But he got to the point where the government thought of him because of his biggest assets, not because he was calling in favors due to his political connections.

In the face of hyperinflation, you better believe the people of Venezuela would trade the risk of external shocks to the nightmare they're living in currently. You may not agree with it, but we have independent evidence that replacing the Bolivar with the US dollar would stabilize the economy because it would bring economic confidence to the currency and the expectation that the currency means something. Hyperinflation is caused by a lack of confidence in the currency, caused and supported by rapid printing of it. Zimbabwe solved its hyperinflation problem by switching to stable foreign currencies, mainly the US dollar.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe#Solutions  There's good reason to expect doing the same thing in Venezuela would stabilize (but not magically fix) the economy.

Assuming that the trajectory Bitcoin took last year is likely to repeat, especially when the trajectory last year is when Bitcoin displayed definite bubble properties, is setting yourself up for disappointment. Bitcoin is not on track for $40,000 this year. People who believe that have to believe in magic, because there's nothing scientific or predictable about how Bitcoin trades. The mania that was out of control last year would have to not only be replicated but exceeded for such a thing to happen, and I'd like to think that everyone has learned their lesson, but reading posts like this prove otherwise.

Gotta stop ya right here for what is obviously unsubstantiated nonsense. Banks and governments don't want people in poverty or slavery. You have to live in a fantasy world to believe that. It's well established that everyone makes more money when everyone participates more fully in the economy. The more consumers there are buying goods and services, the more financial products they demand (good for banks) and the more taxes they pay (good for governments). This "I want to believe in every conspiracy theory against crypto" garbage that people go out of their way to peddle on these boards is getting out of control.

McAfee is a lunatic. He built a successful antivirus business, sold it for a fortune, pretty lost the vast majority of it in the financial collapse, and has been pretty unhinged since then. He was a person of interest in a murder in Belize, started his own political party, tried unsuccessfully to secure the Libertarian nomination for president in 2016, and generally says stupid things all the time now, like Bitcoin will be a million dollars by 2020. I wouldn't put much stock into anything he says.

If bitcoin were at $50,000, it would almost be at a trillion market cap by itself. Total crypto market cap has been a lot closer to a trillion than it is right now. Not to say it can't happen, but $50,000 is a joke. No "expert" actually believes that and no one who believes that will ever be an "expert." This is a mindless pump post, it doesn't even provide a source fr the so-called "experts."

They're probably warning people to be wary of people hyping pyramid schemes and HYIP using crypto, not warning that crypto itself is a pyramid scheme. Based on the amount of scamming going on and the amount of money dumbly chasing get rich quick schemes, the warnings are completely justified. There's still a dearth of regulation, and there are far too many people taking advantage of susceptible folks.

Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of man. The middle class has grown entirely out of a class of people who used to be poor. China will move an estimated 800 million people out of poverty and subsistence living to the middle class on the back of a predominantly capitalistic market, and that's only possible because China has embraced economic reform and moved away from a purely communist system.

Skilled traders can usually make a profit in any market condition. Long term holders take variance completely out of the equation and that tends to smooth out returns over long periods of time. That's great in a steadily increasing market or a volatile market that still has an upward trajectory over long periods of time, but it really sucks in times like now where volatility is in a downward trend. Trading (as opposed to investing) is probably more beneficial in this type of market if you're actually skilled enough to do it properly.

Market utility isn't superficial because it's the actual root cause of wealth. You couldn't turn that example around because simply reversing the words wouldn't make it true. Money isn't actual wealth, it's a representation of wealth you've accumulated through the efforts of what you offer the market, either through the products you make or the services you offer. The more utility those goods and services have, the more money you ultimately will acquire. But you don't get the money without the utility, that's how you know it's the cause of it.

I see your point perfectly fine, I just think it's wrong. (Also, I only parroted the language you used, and then you later disputed your own point.) The fact remains that no amount of luck is going to keep Microsoft's products in demand. They have to be useful for that to happen. Luck played a role to a certain extent in the start of Microsoft, but market utility of the products they create blows luck out of the water in terms of how much value they've created in the world.

Sure, there is a difference there. I agree with your nuance that the SEC doesn't control the companies that issues securities, but rather the market they trade in. To me, that appears to be an appropriate role. Without that type of regulation, things would operate in very much a wild west type of atmosphere, and you see that happening in crypto right now all over the place. The fact that there are so many wolves trying to each the sheep is why this space needs to be regulated, just like the securities space needs to be regulated.

You're trying to draw a semantic difference, but just follow it through and see if it still makes sense. You're acknowledging that a price drop doesn't mean the asset price will rise again, which was my initial argument. Now you're saying that it's about probability and statistics. The implication here seems to be that because the price is lower than it was, it is now more likely to go back up than not. That's just as false as assuming that a price has to eventually be higher than it is right now if you just wait long enough. To me, it seems like the same conclusion, just arrived by a slightly more nuanced means. Price level and likelihood of price rise are not related, they're independent variables, so it's the same logical error as before. If the inverse were true, everyone would be smartest to never buy quality stocks that have good reason to be trading at very high prices (think Berkshire or Apple) and only trade in penny stocks which are mostly garbage companies with no viable business plan.

No, market utility is what induces people to spend money. Your explanation is superficial as it only looks at the surface level of what is happening (money changing hands) instead of looking at why money is changing hands (people find the product/service useful and agree to exchange their money for it). Money only represents wealth, market utility of products is what actually creates wealth. Money is just a representation of value that has been created, but market utility is what is what actually creates value.


Let's assume this is 100% true as written. Luck played a part in that Mary Gates helped secure an early contract, but luck did not make Microsoft's products desired by IBM or the rest of the world. If the product was "shitty" as you say, IBM doesn't use it and the rest of the world doesn't desire it. Luck didn't make Microsoft's products useful and therefore demanded, intelligence of the builder and market utility of his product did.

It's actually not hard to alter the protocol, anyone can split off a fork for any reason very easily, and this has been done dozens of times. The difficult part is getting anyone else to use the forked chain and protocol or acknowledging it as the real Bitcoin. I think we've probably seen enough at this point to probably expect that consensus is pretty much impossible. For any major change, there's always going to be some percentage of the users who are against change, and a competing faction that insists either the pre-fork or post-fork is the true Bitcoin while the other side are heretics. You saw this happen with Bitcoin Cash. Both sides claiming they're the "true" Bitcoin. For a decentralized ledger that is controlled by the masses, I guess the only real Bitcoin is what the most people claim it to be. It's all arbitrary, and could change at any time.

But this has nothing to do with regulation. You don't need to control Bitcoin to regulate it.

Just to clear up all the non-information and misinformation in this thread, Mt. Gox isn't doing anything because Mt. Gox isn't operating any more and isn't in control of the coins. Mt. Gox is in bankruptcy and there is an administrator in charge of the assets that has been appointed by the court to represent and act in the best interest of all the people Mt. Gox owes money to. The administrator is selling the coins to pay bills and creditors, and it is done so with court permission. Nobody has agency to decide for themselves what coins to sell or when, everything is with permission of the court only, and it is not expected that all the coins will be liquidated because Mt. Gox can repay all its creditors with far fewer bitcoins than they still have in their possession because the btc is worth so much more now than it was when Mt. Gox stopped functioning as an exchange.

That's not true at all. It can be regulated without being controlled. The SEC regulates all companies that sell their securities to the public, but the SEC doesn't control any of them. That's just one example of how regulation doesn't necessitate control. As it relates to Bitcoin, there is already regulation. New York has the Bitlicense for any company dealing in crypto in the state of New York, and it doesn't require any control over Bitcoin or blockchain at all. The fact that it was happening already and you seemingly didn't know about it shows how regulation and control of Bitcoin aren't related at all.