You’d have to have invested, at minimum, hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to have made enough to retire peacefully, and I doubt it’s all that many people in that boat. Plus, if you’re still holding it in crypto you’re at enormous risk is losing it because of the volatility, so retiring with a lot of a speculative asset as your nest egg would be extremely risky.

Perhaps that’s true for some voters, but I’d put it in the vast minority of cases. If there’s an easy way to characterize what motivates a conservative voter it’s that they're generally low information voters who are motivated mainly by fear, which is why it’s so easy for these charlatan politicians to come in and convince them that there is a scapegoat for all their problems and only they can fix it so you have to vote for them. That was Bolsonaro’s pitch, that was and is still Trump’s pitch. And unfortunately there is a large segment of the population that will never been smart enough to see through it.

Bitcoin is just a perfect example of a speculative market. Anyone who pretends like they understand what is happening or where bitcoin is going is either lying to themself or to you.

Since the Fed has been actively trying to get the inflation rate above 2% on a macro scale, it seems like things right now are pretty much going as expected. Not sure why this is a giant shock to you. The Fed has not made it a secret, they've told everyone explicitly that they're targeting long-term average inflation rates of 2%, and because we've been below that for so long, that necessarily means inflation above that in order to reach the average of 2%.

The underlined text is definitely false. The republicans have been cutting IRS funding and staffing for years to make the agency as ineffective as possible. The bolded text is exactly the problem, those evading taxes they owe will continue to do so unless the IRS is granted the ability to bring these scofflaws to justice. And the italicized text is a joke. Everyone knows that more IRS funding will definitely increase compliance and increase compliance, it's exactly the same reason republicans have targeted the agency to shrink its ranks.

If bitcoin died there are plenty of others to take its place. And it's hard to buy the argument that bitcoin disappearing would have wide-spread impact since the vast minority of people in the world have any exposure to bitcoin at all. It may affect some people immensely, but overall the impact would be quite small when measuring on a global scale.

I don't think the Model 3 is out of reach for the majority of Americans, and that's the car they're bringing to mass production in hopes of reaching the masses. The problem is the Model 3 is not nearly as profitable as the other Tesla models, even at scale, so margins will compress as they sell more of those cars.

Firstly, ever nation that wants to get out from under the thumb of the US-denominated financial system has an incentive to adopt the digital Yuan. This includes countries that want to evade US sanctions, as well as those that want to weaken US hegemony.  At a minimum, this means Iran, North Korea and perhaps Russia to an extent, although the Russians are more likely to attempt a Russian digital currency than to become subservient to China. But as a strategic geo-rival, the Russians are very much interested in weakening the US globally.

The taxes aren't to pay for stimulus specifically, but to reduce the deficit that republicans have exploded during every stint they've been in power since the 1980s. Although they do a lot of talking about how they're the party of fiscal discipline, a dispassionate look at the numbers reveals how big of a lie this is. Reagan promised to limit the size of government and then promptly doubled the size of the deficit with a rash of new spending while cutting taxes. Bush Jr. is still the president with the largest deficit in US history, and Trump inherited a recovering economy and rapidly shrinking deficit only to explode the deficit back over a trillion dollars under the best economy the US has seen in decades. The level of mismanagement is impossible to overstate.

If you define "correction" how the stock market traditionally defines a correction, then bitcoin just had a correction. It dropped from 65k to 52k just a couple weeks ago and has been recovering since then. But if you read the sentiment when this happens, people are eagerly embracing the opportunity, they're wondering why bitcoin is down and wondering how much lower it's gonna go.

We don't know bitcoin's value is driven primarily by its deflationary nature; it could just be mass hysteria driven by media and the self-fulfilling prophecy of ever larger number of people believing in the meme that it can never fail. Historically, such financial blind faith has not ended well. I'd personally bet that nothing is safe more than bitcoin can never fail.

Except it was confirmed not to be dogecoin. Elon said Tesla bought and holds bitcoin. If it was dogecoin they would have said so. There's zero reason to substitute dogecoin in bitcoin's place or to raise uncertainty about which crypto Tesla owns since it is confirmed to be bitcoin.

I think the points in and out of bitcoin are very few where you can get convert bitcoin anonymously, and once you're identified you can be tracked because all transactions are public. There are probably ways around it, and there are other coins that may be more privacy focused and make it harder to track and identify individuals, so enforcement will need to find a way close those loopholes if they ever become a large tax avoidance mechanism.

There are very few places where you can exchange crypto anonymously and that number will continue to drop as necessary regulations move into place, such as KYC. Further, volatility is not a beneficial attribute of an asset. Day traders might like it, but people who want assets that actually protect wealth and not gamble with it will find volatility a huge detriment. Literally nothing you listed as a positive is an improvement in crypto over stocks.

Why would the government be printing trillions of dollars to stimulate an already booming economy? That's not the point of stimulus and not how stimulus works. You do stimulus when the economy is lagging.  As it is, the economy is booming in the US, posting robust GDP growth.  The US economy in Q1 2021 has already surpassed where it was in Q1 2019, so there's every expectation the economy will be back to where it was pre-COVID on a full-year basis.

If you're not expecting huge price drops in an asset that is defined by huge price volatility, that's on you I guess? It wasn't surprising to me and it won't be surprising to me when it happens again.  It was only a 20% drop, which is pretty routine even in assets that aren't defined by their volatility (like the stock market at large). Bitcoin has suffered far worse and will suffer far worse in the future.

China is releasing a digital Yuan (there's already a pilot program running in the country) and you're right, they are able to monitor the flow of money in real time. They know exactly how much money you have, where you spend it, and most alarmingly, they can assign the money to expire if not spent by a certain date which forces stimulus spending by the population without cost to the government of handing out money and hoping people spend it. Digital currencies are going to be a very bad development, and yet they seem inevitable.

The government defines the taxes and people pay them. People cheating the current tax laws costs the US government hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The IRS audits people to find the cheats and forces them to pay up. The IRS is understaffed (intentionally because of republican deliberate attempts to undermine the system).  So spending $80 billion dollars on more IRS staff will create $800 billion over the next 10 years in people paying the taxes they currently owe but cheat the government out of.  To answer your question, the money initially comes from congress, it ultimately is paid back 10x by people paying taxes they owe.


Topic isn't misleading, you just don't understand what's going on. If banks are required to report transaction totals to the government (which they don't have to do currently), it increases the audit risk for anyone dodging taxes. This incentivizes anyone dodging taxes to reduce banking transactions in order to continue evading taxes, which means either cash or crypto. Since cash isn't particularly useful in an e-commerce economy, crypto becomes attractive for those trying to dodge paying taxes.

The Model S is their higher end offering, it's not meant to be the mass market car. The Telsa Model 3 is the mass market car with a price range in the $30,000 range, so much more affordable to the masses. This brings it close to what the average price paid for a new car is. With the lower price comes compressed margins though, so as Model 3s take up a larger share of revenues, the gross profit on these cars will be considerably less than what Tesla has experienced thus far, which proves another problem for the current valuation.

I think it's a lot closer than it was. It's all still speculation until we can get a hard number from a regulatory filing, but until then everyone is trying to piece it together based on information that has been publicly released. It's like trying to assemble a puzzle where you don't even know how many pieces there are or what shape they're supposed to be.