Very well, you didn’t lie:  You were careless with the truth.  Noted.

(The 2017 dates were obvious in the URLs.  That is what jumped out at me, at a glance; and I presumed that you must have noticed, too.)


That sounds like an argument that the Chinese are just smarter and saner than everybody else; I don’t buy it.  And you still did not explain why a beer festival, which they apparently hold every year, constitutes “[laughing] at the rest of the world's naivety and ignorance”.

In WO, in in my own P&S thread, and elsewhere, I have been shouting from the rooftops since March that people should stop panicking.  (Though there is something to panic about:  Impending extreme economic hardship, starvation, and unlimited tyranny...  I fear hunger more than I fear Covid!)  I saw that the self-destructive mass reaction was bad; so did many others, IIRC (?) including you.  If people don’t heed sound reason, I don’t see what the Chinese have to do with it—unless the Chinese somehow control other peoples’ governments, mainstream media, and masses of ordinary people who are blindly terrified into submission.


Why shouldn’t the Chinese have a “fun, normal existence”?  Just because everybody else has succumbed to mass hysteria?

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Corona renamed their beer.  Stupid.

I just noticed that Wikimedia Commons memory-holed the old Corona beer logo—WTF?  Thus, the broken image link:


https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corona-logo.svg

Suuurrre...  I see that the Coke and Pepsi logos are still there.

It does not explain why you would lie about the images before.  That is an important question.

Also, as a separate issue, your argument is nonsensical.  Even if all of these images (including the ones from 2017) were from the present, it doesn’t show that “They are literally laughing at the stupidity of rest of the world rn”—unless you suggest that everybody who ever enjoys himself over beer must be celebrating at others’ misfortune.

Are beer festivals ipso facto evil?  Or would the Chinese be disallowed from all ordinary pleasures because people in other countries decided to act like headless chickens?  Please clarify.

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What!?

(Well, maybe they fear being accused of celebrating the self-destruction of the Americans, the English, the Germans—no, wait...)

Responsibility for the panic lies squarely on the idiots who have been panicking.  Why would the Chinese be to blame for others’ foolishness?

Moreover, your images from 2017 are clearly misrepresented as “meanwhile”, “rn [right now]”, i.e. from the present.  Why would you do this?  Dishonest.

If Satoshi were captured by the Chinese government while carrying a secret Bitcoin kill switch (soon to be confirmed by Coindesk and science)...

“τὸ κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾽ ἐσθλὸν τῷδ᾽ ἔμμεν' ὅτῳ φρένας θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν”

Taking that little tall tale of “wallstreetbets” at face value:^*

“20-something virgin”!?  20?  29?  Regardless, my takeaway from that story is that buying Tesla stock is for mental eunuchs with congenitally defective instincts.  If you can’t figure out how to communicate with females on a normal time scale, then perhaps you shouldn’t be bragging on the Internet about how you lied, scammed your mum for petty cash, gambled it, got lucky, and then decided to use the proceeds to hire a £300/hour therapist to help with your problem.  (Dear me, that girl should raise her rates if this is what she has to deal with.)

The whole story makes TSLA a STRONG SELL.  Are their cars (let’s call them Muskmobiles) also for sexually inadequate losers who scam their own mothers to get laid?

* Of course, parts of the story are implausible (5-star penthouse suite for “£150 per night”?).  But who cares?  That is not the point.



Poor mindrust.  He never got back in, did he?


Well, they deliver us something better than Ethland-style “move fast and break things”.

There is still significant technical work being done on the relevant BIPs, although IIUC, they are almost done.  I expect for the real slowdown to be getting it activated—not (I hope) any nonsense as with Segwit v0, since all the anti-Segwit crowd has been shaken out to forked shitcoins; and fortunately, Segwit’s versioning system was designed to make these upgrades smooth from v0 all the way up to v15.  It’s just slow to get even softfork changes running live on a currency network that doesn’t move fast and break things.

Jay,

That veritable mini-book you wrote to me is much appreciated.  I spent a long time drafting a reply thereto—then, a longer time contemplating whether or not it reveals too much potentially identifying information.  Not in the way you may think—but it’s nevertheless a concern, and I am still thinking about that.  With apologies, for now, I’ll need to cut the main part, and leave only the tangent at the end:


As a matter of thinking differently about goals, I posit that, unless a major expenditure is desired, there should be no “liquidation” phase for any asset with the fundamentals to constitute a long-term investment (as opposed to a short-term speculation).  Given your apparent familiarity with estate planning, you can probably guess why:  A goal of parlaying personal success into the intergenerational accumulation of familial wealth.

What is best left to one’s children?  Depreciating fiat currency?  Or a portfolio of gold, real estate, and nowadays, Bitcoin?  (I don’t consider stocks to be a “long-term” investment, unless either it is a large share of a privately held company under management personally known and trusted, or you have a Warren Buffet strategy with commensurate capital.)

Of course, such planning must assure insofar as practicable that one’s heirs are of a character to grow the wealth and pass it on, rather than irresponsibly dissipating it.  Now, there is a discussion which could delve deeply into the context of the rule against perpetuities—among many other topics:  The legal terms of devises cannot substitute for sound breeding and upraising.

A small anecdote:  Many years ago, I had an affair with a woman whose late father had devised significant assets to a trust with her as a beneficiary.  The trust was made to convey its assets to her when she was thirty-five years of age, on condition that she was married.  Obviously, the late gentleman must have desired some assurance that he would have grandchildren who would naturally benefit from their mother’s enrichment.  Well—she was past age thirty-five, married, independently wealthy thanks to papa, and—she didn’t want any children, ever!  In a sumptuous hotel bed that she paid for, she told me that she had never before cheated on her husband; take that for what it’s worth.

I would suggest that for having heirs worthy of the estate, the human element is much more important than legal concerns over the rule against perpetuities, etc.

At least, “long term stable in the $200-$500 range” is an improvement from “long term down trend to zero”.  Perhaps in the future, when people are using bundles of $100 bills as home heating fuel, proudhon may grudgingly admit that Bitcoin could be worth $10k someday, “after a lot of faffing about”.


I found that via a post by Last of the V8s, which came right after the reference post for Lauda’s red tag on proudhon.  TiagoTiago’s tag led me to this:


Via a Reddit link, that post led me back to a WO post that speaks for itself:


Confirmed science!


What is Quarkcoin?

Watch the development of Spectrum, the Layer 3 counterpart to RGB.  Its basic design is to use L2 Lightning (and thus, the Bitcoin blockchain) to enforce scalable, efficient, private off-chain execution of smart contracts.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/video-interview-giacomo-zucco-rgb-tokens-built-bitcoin
The video interview discusses defi explicitly.  Giacomo Zucco has quite the sense of humour:  He jokes about the oddity of a Bitcoin maximalist developing something that can be used for such awful things as defi and tokens.

Of course, it does tokens.  Apparently, the Tether people are interested.  (Maybe funding this?  Not sure.)  Imagine USDT running on Bitcoin proper.

The RGB/Spectrum smart contract language is Blockstream’s Simplicity, which is designed from its inception to support formal verification.  The glue that binds the off-chain contracts to the blockchain and makes them enforceable is a quite clever trick originally invented by Peter Todd.

(I do think there is a place for scalable on-chain contract execution, for use cases in which parties really need to be able to just disconnect and let the contract run on the blockchain.  But it won’t be Ethereum; ETH2 is basically a desperate mirage at this point, insofar as I can discern.  Other projects will eat their lunch.  And for most use cases, on-chain execution is just a massive waste of resources.)

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Many replies to catch up with!  I’ll take this bit by bit...

Thanks, Jay.  I learned from your reply, and picked up some new concepts to research.

Whilst I ponder that, I think that I should clarify a few points:


I must emphasize that apart from the pain of minimizing badly-timed expenditures, that is the perspective that informs my question!  When the bears are out in force, I usually ignore the market as much as I can.  Hereto, that has always worked out well:  “It’s down.  I don’t care.  It will be back up.”

If, however, the fundamentals of the market have changed—not Bitcoin’s own fundamentals, but the foundation of the whole economy—then I think it’s worthwhile to re-evaluate that stance in the context of the current situation.  Not from turning bearish on Bitcoin—to the contrary!  Panic and infectious negativity are bad; so is sticking one’s head in the sand.  Bitcoin has huge potential right now, but also faces dangers to which I should not blind myself.

I think that the current economic situation is unprecedented:  Never before have markets been so globally interdependent, and all based in total fiat currencies unbacked by anything whatsoever, and suddenly hit simultaneously, in numerous countries, with government policies that are tantamount to economic arson.  It is only rational to take a fresh look at what probable scenarios may come to pass, if the cycles and trends of the past eleven years wind up totally broken.


Actually, I was eliciting a question mark:  Will we get an upward spiral, or a downward spiral?  I expect the upwards one.  Whereas I am admittedly biased, given that I am not only heavily invested in Bitcoin, but financially dependent on it.  In the absence of that crystal ball that so many people claim to have, I thought to ask around in WO, where the best regulars are much better informed about the markets than I am.

It seems that, at least at a first impression, you think I may not be wide of the mark in my expectation that fiat inflation should significantly drive up the dollars-to-bitcoins ratio due to the dollar’s fall, not Bitcoin’s rise—though of course, adoption can simultaneously push Bitcoin up further.  Well, I may have overshot when last I mentioned it in March; I hope so!


Sound advice.  Speaking from hard experience.

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And here I expected some technical analysis evaluating the stock-to-flow model of your words.  The rule against perpetuities is a more interesting take, however.  Do you suppose that in the absence thereof, you could will your distant descendants to continue producing your words in accord with your own present wishes?

End of the economy if JJG ran out of words!  Depression!  Collapse!  DOOMSDAY!

No, it is not correct—outside the fantasies of the Newspeak Dictionary, Tenth Edition (or is it the Eleventh now?).

I don’t want to feed more off-topic drama, much less engage in a “pronouns” flamewar at this particular moment.  This is just one of those issues where bad information stands, unless somebody contradicts it.  I will do so, for the promotion of singular “they” is a part of the linguistic degeneration that has rendered most of the Internet not only illiterate, but illegible; and it is politically motivated, however much you may disclaim “political correctness”.

I don’t want to come off as lecturing you about language usage.  I just ask you to please not lecture others on it—especially not to declare peremptorily correct a contentious usage that is widely abhorred.


Perhaps.  What of it?

I have engaged in similar speculations about others, but never corrected the pronouns applied to people who choose to keep this one binary bit of identifying information private.  On a forum that respects privacy and anonymity, I suggest that it is generally appropriate to avoid prying, unless you are friendly enough with a person to ask in private.  Simply pick whatever pronoun seems best to fit the available evidence, and stick to it unless contrary evidence arises.

(I have corrected others who decided to refer to me as a hipster default “she”.)

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Back in the day—when people spoke English, in contradistinction to the bastardized postmodern cant used by degenerate anthropoids with pickled brains.


Yes.

Edit/P.S.:  “Back in the day”, women customarily signed their letters with a parenthesized title so that others would know whether to apply “Mrs.” or “Miss”.  E.g., “Sincerely, Alice Smith (Mrs.)”.  Just sayin’...

Soooo...  Any insights on if/when/how we are getting decoupled from stocks, and (I hope) coupled to precious metals?

If he shorted Bitcoin with his beloved “high leverage” in 2011 (were there markets with margin then?), or even if he just sold all of his bitcoins at that time, then perhaps that may explain his apparent vendetta.  Think about it...

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I recall once having caught a link to some sad story on Reddit about a young fellow who shorted DASH with all the leverage he could obtain.  He wound up throwing into margin calls all of his Bitcoin, and almost all of the fiat in his bank account.  From about $150k in liquid assets that he had slowly saved, he very quickly wound up with $600 (six hundred dollars) to his name.  He was contemplating suicide.

DASH is more or less my definition of “overvalued shitcoin”—but shorts are very dangerous, and highly leveraged shorts all the moreso...

If proudhon were simply bearish on Bitcoin, I would disagree; but it could be a reasonable disagreement.  I am picking on him because he is advising a “high leverage” (!) short based on his alleged “scientific” certainty of the future.

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A big short can be spectacular if, say, you have the combination of a rare opportunity, sufficient capital to move the market, and an exceedingly high risk tolerance.  The infamous Soros short of the pound comes to mind.  That was betting the company on a calculated risk, in a very unusual situation—and he did actually have enough capital to move the whole market.

But for every such famous case, there are so many others who went bankrupt.  Oftentimes, it has been the types who look on Internet forums for investment advice.

“Strongly short with high leverage”?  “Confirmed science”?  Seriously?  Regardless of one’s expectations for Bitcoin, that is not only bad investment advice:  It is sadistic investment advice.

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Addendum

Wow.  After I drafted the foregoing, I checked proudhon’s trust page.

I wonder how many people have lost money over this.  I hope that most people ignore him.

He’s too busy enjoying all the wealth that he has gained by the magic of “strongly short with high leverage”.

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Edit:  For my whole life, I have been mathematically certain that the U.S. dollar will crash.  I am still so certain.

I now pause to wonder where I would be, if I had entered leveraged shorts of the dollar 20 years ago.  Nowhere good, I think.

Somebody is going to get hurt this way.

Only fools claim scientific knowledge of the future in such matters.

An empirical scientific question:  How often has your “scientific” crystal ball produced correct predictions in the past, versus incorrect predictions?

If it quacks like a duck...


Interesting definition of “everyone”.  Among others, it excludes all the people who aren’t dumping at any price greater than or equal to $3k.

IMO, coupling with PMs would be good.  Very good.  Is it really happening, or just bots run wild?

I, for one, fervently hope that Bitcoin’s real purchase power follows that of gold if when the bottom falls from beneath everything else, including fiat currencies.

USD/EUR are STRONG SELL.

Oh, an article from “the land of the free”:


Just like suicide is a sure means to prevent disease before it happens.  It is scientifically proven to prevent 100.0% of cancer, AIDS, Ebola, and even (zomg!) coronavirus.

Cf. “God will know his own.”

Edit with financial advice:  Being totally impoverished prevents financial losses.

It got so much attention (and merit) because it was ridiculous.  Not good.



I suggest that the first rule of merit should be that those who complain about not getting any, should not get any.  Same for those who try to impose on others their own notions of what a “fair” distribution should be.


Or Development & Technology. ;-)


Or the rest of the Internet.  —Or (gasp!) this thing that I heard about, which is called “real life”.


FTFY.

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