Martin Armstrong Discussion

[sidhujag]

...

sidhujag

We are now arguing over the semantics of counterparty and government.

A solution re which to hold (gold or Bitcoin) is easy.  As I have long argued, and have the battle scars to prove it, HODLing both Bitcoin and gold neatly addresses some of your concerns.  Since no one can predict the future, having some holdings of each reduces risk of Black Swan events taking your wealth.

Gold IS wealth.  Wealth is something you own, that costs currency to get.  With gold you are already paid.  Bitcoin needs a transaction...

I am very curious to see if iamnotback's latest speculative calls (SELL cryptos, a tad over-simplifying) is going to come true.

Its about what is the most ideal money.. you can spread risk by buying both but we are talking about which has a better chance at increasing speculative value which imo is bitcoin and not gold but many people dont see  crypto yet so may get some pumps in gold which will get faded over long term

[OROBTC]

...

sidhujag

We are now arguing over the semantics of counterparty and government.

A solution re which to hold (gold or Bitcoin) is easy.  As I have long argued, and have the battle scars to prove it, HODLing both Bitcoin and gold neatly addresses some of your concerns.  Since no one can predict the future, having some holdings of each reduces risk of Black Swan events taking your wealth.

Gold IS wealth.  Wealth is something you own, that costs currency to get.  With gold you are already paid.  Bitcoin needs a transaction...

I am very curious to see if iamnotback's latest speculative calls (SELL cryptos, a tad over-simplifying) is going to come true.

Its about what is the most ideal money.. you can spread risk by buying both but we are talking about which has a better chance at increasing speculative value which imo is bitcoin and not gold but many people dont see  crypto yet so may get some pumps in gold which will get faded over long term

Everyone has their opinion.

"Ideal Money" is a slippery and ill-defined term.  Money's best definition, IMO, is that it is three things:

-- Unit of Account
-- Method of Exchange
-- Store of Value

Gold, in general, is the best Store of Value, having served that role for 6000 years.  ALL paper currencies to date (the US$, the Euro, etc. are next) have failed.  The US$ is down some 97% since 1913 (founding of the Federal Reserve).

Bitcoin may very well have the better long term speculative prospects for going WAY UP in price.  Hey, could be!  But you don't know that, nor I.  NO ONE does.  Bitcoin may die a horrible death someday (maybe soon with the SW-BU civil war).

Hold both!  The argument over "ideal money" is no good.  There is NO form of ideal money that adequately addresses the three properties above.

[iamnotback]

Apparently LTC will likely be a hedge against the coming BTC decline. Go long LTC (Litecoin) now.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1663070.msg18614017#msg18614017

(I deleted this post temporary at 11:40 because so many of you jumped on it buying LTC that you caused a significant price rise and volume, thus were interfering with me covering my short and taking a long position. I am re-posting now that I completed my trade)

[iamnotback]

A solution re which to hold (gold or Bitcoin) is easy.  As I have long argued, and have the battle scars to prove it, HODLing both Bitcoin and gold neatly addresses some of your concerns.

That is not a solution. It is will impoverish you.

Gold is going to $5k max, Bitcoin to $500k.

Crypto-currency and blockchains will subsume everything.

Gold IS wealth.  Wealth is something you own, that costs currency to get.  With gold you are already paid.  Bitcoin needs a transaction...

Academically incorrect.

I am very curious to see if iamnotback's latest speculative calls (SELL cryptos, a tad over-simplifying) is going to come true.

Sell BTC and buy LTC.

LTC is now a long-term hodling.

Repurchase some BTC with LTC after BTC's -30% crash.

[sidhujag]

...

sidhujag

We are now arguing over the semantics of counterparty and government.

A solution re which to hold (gold or Bitcoin) is easy.  As I have long argued, and have the battle scars to prove it, HODLing both Bitcoin and gold neatly addresses some of your concerns.  Since no one can predict the future, having some holdings of each reduces risk of Black Swan events taking your wealth.

Gold IS wealth.  Wealth is something you own, that costs currency to get.  With gold you are already paid.  Bitcoin needs a transaction...

I am very curious to see if iamnotback's latest speculative calls (SELL cryptos, a tad over-simplifying) is going to come true.

Its about what is the most ideal money.. you can spread risk by buying both but we are talking about which has a better chance at increasing speculative value which imo is bitcoin and not gold but many people dont see  crypto yet so may get some pumps in gold which will get faded over long term

Everyone has their opinion.

"Ideal Money" is a slippery and ill-defined term.  Money's best definition, IMO, is that it is three things:

-- Unit of Account
-- Method of Exchange
-- Store of Value

Gold, in general, is the best Store of Value, having served that role for 6000 years.  ALL paper currencies to date (the US$, the Euro, etc. are next) have failed.  The US$ is down some 97% since 1913 (founding of the Federal Reserve).

Bitcoin may very well have the better long term speculative prospects for going WAY UP in price.  Hey, could be!  But you don't know that, nor I.  NO ONE does.  Bitcoin may die a horrible death someday (maybe soon with the SW-BU civil war).

Hold both!  The argument over "ideal money" is no good.  There is NO form of ideal money that adequately addresses the three properties above.

It's not ill-defined at all, in fact it is well-defined and we can tightly correlate bitcoin with the most ideal form of money in existance. If you know how money markets work they are always looking for efficiency. No form of capital controls can stop it. I don't see any war, BU is non-existant to me, it doesn't change the fundamentals.

[iamnotback]

I agree with $500,000 prediction being too high, even $100,000 is still to high. Gold is a 5000 year asset, no way Bitcoin will surpass it in 13 years from now, just not possible! Sorry, but it's nonsense.

Lol. Bitcoin and gold are roughly the same price. Gold is going to $5k max, Bitcoin to $500k.

Buying gold is an impoverishment plan.

Crypto-currency and blockchains will subsume everything.

Tinfoil hats and @dinofelis will be left behind.

Now we know why the Bible says we will throw our gold and silver into the street. Precious metals will become relatively worthless. Remember iron used to be a precious metal (it's documented in Rise of Knowledge, Decline of Finance essay). Commodities are on inexorable trend of lower value (because we can increase their supply at lower costs with new technologies for mining). And gold can't compete with Bitcoin's better attributes.

[sidhujag]

I agree with $500,000 prediction being too high, even $100,000 is still to high. Gold is a 5000 year asset, no way Bitcoin will surpass it in 13 years from now, just not possible! Sorry, but it's nonsense.

Lol. Bitcoin and gold are roughly the same price. Gold is going to $5k max, Bitcoin to $500k.

Buying gold is an impoverishment plan.

Crypto-currency and blockchains will subsume everything.

Tinfoil hats and @dinofelis will be left behind.

Now we know why the Bible says we will throw our gold and silver into the street. Precious metals will become relatively worthless. Remember iron used to be a precious metal (it's documented in Rise of Knowledge, Decline of Finance essay). Commodities are on inexorable trend of lower value (because we can increase their supply at lower costs with new technologies for mining). And gold can't compete with Bitcoin's better attributes.

That is right and we still don't know how much gold is left to mine, which is an unknown and we know pricing a market asset based on unknown supply is also unknown and thus cannot really be a safe haven long term when there exists something else which has a hard limit. Any number you come up with in terms of gold is speculative, and doesn't factor something like an astroid which might have materials that earth does not inflating supply of materials. Commodities always return to their mean average based on industrial usage and extraction costs. The only time they have speculative value is when they are safe havens during uncertain times. Now that uncertainty seems to have subsided (for average joes) commodities fall to their real value. Uncertain times usually are only a small fraction of the total time in ones life and thus commodities in general are in bear markets but with large spikes. Bitcoin has utility and safe haven status and thus has higher potential as people start looking away from commodities and into a better asset class that won't erode when safe haven status diminishes. This was all clearly defined in Szabo's post we gave to roach which he did not read and/or understand properly.

[OROBTC]

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iamnotback

If the price increases of gold (to $5000) and BTC (to $500,000) are in non-hyperinflated dollars, it escapes me to see how holding both BTC and Au are a path to impoverishment...

So let us know whether your predictions are for constant dollars, "somewhat inflated" or hyperinflated.  Thanks!

It is important to know that, or at least have an idea.  Behold, a 5,000,000 Inti bank note from Peru:



[Above is not mine, I just found a picture on the 'Net]

Just today I found one buried away in my closet (we are moving across town before too long).  At the time I was in Peru, that note was worth maybe $8.

[OROBTC]

...

Armstrong looks at yet another problem in Italy (and so Europe).  The oldest bank in the world is in big trouble (they have been for years), here's the latest:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/europes-current-economy/trying-to-save-monte-paschi-oldest-bank-in-the-world/

I once used a Monthe Paschi ATM machine on a visit to Italy years ago.  I wonder if those machines are still handing out CASH...   

[r0ach]

Its about what is the most ideal money..

Which is why you should not refer to a Rube Goldberg machine as ideal money.  Bitcoin is literally just a half assed multiplayer video game, nothing more.  Calling a completely arbitrarly designed video game "ideal money" is worse than listening to some type of cargo cult religious fundamentalist.

Repurchase some BTC with LTC after BTC's -30% crash.

They can probably prop BTC up at a little over $1000 when/if it dumps, so post stabilization probably only more like -15%, but the whole lower highs + lower lows deal is possible.

[sidhujag]

Its about what is the most ideal money..

Which is why you should not refer to a Rube Goldberg machine as ideal money.  Bitcoin is literally just a half assed multiplayer video game, nothing more.  Calling a completely arbitrarly designed video game "ideal money" is worse than listening to some type of cargo cult religious fundamentalist.

Repurchase some BTC with LTC after BTC's -30% crash.

They can probably prop BTC up at a little over $1000 when/if it dumps, so post stabilization probably only more like -15%, but the whole lower highs + lower lows deal is possible.

Gold is really a thing of the last.. crypto including alts will replace the marketcap of gold with all safe haven money running for cover when gold collapses back to its real value

[r0ach]

Gold is really a thing of the last.. crypto including alts will replace the marketcap of gold with all safe haven money running for cover when gold collapses back to its real value

[sidhujag]

Gold is really a thing of the last.. crypto including alts will replace the marketcap of gold with all safe haven money running for cover when gold collapses back to its real value

aahh that would nicely clean your fud.. awesome

[sidhujag]

As predicted ltc rally was faded.. it did set up a nice short. See I can do it too thats 2 for 2. Hold that short till 4 bucks

[r0ach]

aahh that would nicely clean your fud.. awesome

Not "fud", reality.  Cryptocurrency has no purpose whatsoever in current state:

Or, the realization creating a "decentralized" currency is probably not even possible without the ability to make something like decentralized captchas where mining requires manual human intervention, otherwise it's just externalized proof of stake in practice - a Rube Goldberg machine that doesn't solve anything.  If you can extract money from people simply by amassing a large amount of capital and using that advantage against them making it where they can't compete or they're forced to buy from you, that's called rent seeking usury, not decentralization.

[OROBTC]

...

Italy wants to raise taxes again.  None of their governments ever listen to what the people want.  Italy is leading the way to a failure of the Euro:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/taxes/italy-to-raise-taxes-to-satisfy-brussels-why-the-euro-will-fail/

*   *   *

Alas, Armstrong does not write too much about gold for us cheapskates (who don't want to pay for his research), but he did publish this graphic of gold volatility:



He is pushing another conference, but he thinks gold's volatility will rise (above graph from his article):

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/precious-metals/gold/the-gold-reports-the-building-of-volatility-the-precursor-to-chaos/

[r0ach]

Alas, Armstrong does not write too much about gold for us cheapskates (who don't want to pay for his research), but he did publish this graphic of gold volatility:

Lol, Armstrong has no valid research.  Steve at SRSRocco just posted a chart showing exactly how the metals game is played by the bankers.  All they do is continuously naked short metals down right to the cost of production over and over.  It's not hard to see what they're doing, it's just flat out Keynesianism applied to the commodity market.  They try and intercepet all spikes in demand with naked shorts to smooth out the curve to make it appear the fiat system is viable or stable.  

All that really matters at this point is inflation will either come roaring back again and send the oil price skyrocketing (and thus metal price), or we'll have a deflationary collapse where all the banks will be boarded up, the USD will no longer be money, and you'll wish you had bought metals instead.  There will be no "buying the dip" for that deflationary crash if it happens.  There will be some type of financial event and they'll send some minion onto the TV to announce all bank accounts are frozen and you'll be receiving a haircut or govt bonds in the place of your "money".  

Either that or another bailout, which would probably just be an instant dollar devaluation in practice.  The last "bailout" was kinda just a slow motion dollar devaluation, but I think the next one will probably be more like an instant one, such as the one done in South Korea in 1998 where the currency value dropped 50% in an instant:



https://srsroccoreport.com/who-really-controls-the-gold-price-the-answer-is-quite-surprising/

[r0ach]

Why I think bitcoin is screwed right now and litecoin probably will continue to go up:

and since Bitcoin has a more predictable supply than Ethereum it can be used as the ideal store of value.

Well, that's where he's completely wrong because no cryptocurrency is a store of value.  It's a currency, not money.  It even says "Cryptocurrency" in the title.  Currencies are never a store of value.  The only thing that gives them value is transaction flow, which is determined by scalability and pushing through millions of cups of coffee, contrary to what people claim where coffee is the bitcoin anti-christ.  Noble metals such as gold and silver are absurdly better at being a store of value (i.e. settlement layer), so there's no way bitcoin and any other coin can compete with them in that regard.  The ONLY way they can compete is in transaction flow (where scalability is key).  If Litecoin adopts segwit (and it actually works to scale), while bitcoin doesn't, I see no reason to hold bitcoin at that point.

I gave the estimate a long time ago (I'm sure somebody remembers it) that you would need at least 8MB blocks (or around 50 TPS) for bitcoin to be a valid, globally used currency with market penetration into the upper middle class.  That's speaking on-chain scaling alone, and at that number, it would probably be uneconomical to do transactions under something like $10,000, but the network would probably continue to exist and not fade into obscurity.  

Jihan Wu and the other Chinese seem to have made a deal that litecoin will go to at least 2MB blocks in the future (the equivalent of bitcoin with 8MB blocks), and agreed to segwit.  So litecoin seems to have passed the minimum required scaling threshold to exist, while bitcoin has not.  Hell, at this point, the optimal strategy for the Chinese might even be continuing to block segwit on bitcoin on purpose to destroy it while investing money into cheap litecoin and profiting on the destruction of BTC as the litecoin they bought for pennies skyrockets.

A similar move was done by the Pilgrims Society in gold vs silver.  Most of these rich bankers and aristocrats had their money invested only in gold, so they conspired to demonetize silver, which had the result of being a transfer of all silver wealth to the gold they hold.  There is nothing to gain by attempting to keep silver down now, so in the near future I imagine some of these same people will conspire to remonetize silver to drain the money back out of gold for profit, thus screwing China, India, Russia, and the arab nations who bought up all the gold.

Since someone made the bad judgement of requiring 95% approval for segwit on bitcoin, there is also the chance it never gets activated.  A government entity, bankers, or whoever could start up some miners and reject segwit while dumping the coins they mine for profit and basically block it perpetually for....FREE...NO COST.  Bitcoin will not scale without forking into two chains and having an enormous rough consensus attack at this point.

[sidhujag]

Why I think bitcoin is screwed right now and litecoin probably will continue to go up:

and since Bitcoin has a more predictable supply than Ethereum it can be used as the ideal store of value.

Well, that's where he's completely wrong because no cryptocurrency is a store of value.  It's a currency, not money.  It even says "Cryptocurrency" in the title.  Currencies are never a store of value.  The only thing that gives them value is transaction flow, which is determined by scalability and pushing through millions of cups of coffee, contrary to what people claim where coffee is the bitcoin anti-christ.  Noble metals such as gold and silver are absurdly better at being a store of value (i.e. settlement layer), so there's no way bitcoin and any other coin can compete with them in that regard.  The ONLY way they can compete is in transaction flow (where scalability is key).  If Litecoin adopts segwit (and it actually works to scale), while bitcoin doesn't, I see no reason to hold bitcoin at that point.

I gave the estimate a long time ago (I'm sure somebody remembers it) that you would need at least 8MB blocks (or around 50 TPS) for bitcoin to be a valid, globally used currency with market penetration into the upper middle class.  That's speaking on-chain scaling alone, and at that number, it would probably be uneconomical to do transactions under something like $10,000, but the network would probably continue to exist and not fade into obscurity.  

Jihan Wu and the other Chinese seem to have made a deal that litecoin will go to at least 2MB blocks in the future (the equivalent of bitcoin with 8MB blocks), and agreed to segwit.  So litecoin seems to have passed the minimum required scaling threshold to exist, while bitcoin has not.  Hell, at this point, the optimal strategy for the Chinese might even be continuing to block segwit on bitcoin on purpose to destroy it while investing money into cheap litecoin and profiting on the destruction of BTC as the litecoin they bought for pennies skyrockets.

A similar move was done by the Pilgrims Society in gold vs silver.  Most of these rich bankers and aristocrats had their money invested only in gold, so they conspired to demonetize silver, which had the result of being a transfer of all silver wealth to the gold they hold.  There is nothing to gain by attempting to keep silver down now, so in the near future I imagine some of these same people will conspire to remonetize silver to drain the money back out of gold for profit, thus screwing China, India, Russia, and the arab nations who bought up all the gold.

Since someone made the bad judgement of requiring 95% approval for segwit on bitcoin, there is also the chance it never gets activated.  A government entity, bankers, or whoever could start up some miners and reject segwit while dumping the coins they mine for profit and basically block it perpetually for....FREE...NO COST.  Bitcoin will not scale without forking into two chains and having an enormous rough consensus attack at this point.

Ltc already has 4mb per 10 mins. Segwit will be approved either way uasf or miners. LN will scale to visa levels through altcoim liquidity to solve centralization issues. Gold hits $500 on its deathbed. Qed.

The great thing about technology is that it can adapt to fit requirements while a commodity cannot.

[r0ach]

Gold hits $500 on its deathbed. Qed.

The great thing about technology is that it can adapt to fit requirements while a commodity cannot.

Lol, what a shill.  No, the price is not going below cost of production unless everyone on the planet simultaneously decides a better substitute for money has been found, except there is no valid replacement for such a role.  Cryptocurrency is a joke because not a single one of these coins is actually decentralized.  Claiming the whole planet is going to forsake gold and silver and use completely centralized digital crap coins in their place just makes you look insane.

Every time you type this "perfect money" nonsense slogan it's like seeing one of those old 18th century physicists talking about "aether".  Sorry, "perfect money" is not completely centralized lol.  If you claim bitcoin is "perfect money", then you could also extend that rationale into saying a coin where only one person on the planet has the technical capability to construct an ASIC for is also perfect money.  It would clearly be a useless monopoly and not perfect anything, and that's close enough to where bitcoin is already in practice.