I finally found my way to this again.
There are 2 classes of long-term investors. One is the one that you are referring to, they do not know much about Bitcoin and are focused on gains. The other is completely opposite of this one, they know a lot about Bitcoin and they try to learn more continuously. They do not care about the price movement short term, but not even that much long-term even though they are confident that the trend is towards positive price performance. They are essentially living and breathing the Bitcoin life, I love people who are like that even if they are rare.
I am not sure why people would need to be in one camp or another, since guys can have gradients of each of the characteristics that you seem to be describing... .. so to be into bitcoin for the self sovereignty and also for the number go up.
In other words, why not both?
Bitcoin specifically has built in incentives and structures that contribute towards motivating investing time, energy and value into bitcoin, whether we are talking about node running, mining, developing, holding bitcoin directly and/or holding bitcoin through paper products (in which the actual bitcoin might not be there).
You are right, but often when we talk about groups or categories we are just doing it for clarity and it is implied that everything else in between can exist. We also say that things can be hot or cold, but they can be anything in between those. I observed those as 2 large groupings, maybe you can see them as extreme opposites of each other. They kind of stand out, that is why I notice them more. The first class is often those that bought all kinds of shitcoins and some of them even believe XRP is the next Bitcoin.
The other class, well if you ever meet a person like that, you will never forget them. Most people are in between, but they are less memorable because of that and that is fine.
You are correct that we likely describe one group and then compare that group with another group, and the two examples might be somewhat extreme from each other, or alternatively each group might share exactly the same characteristics except we might change one or two of the variables in order to show how the changing of those narrow sets of variables might make a difference in one direction or another and sometimes the difference is great enough to be noteworthy and other times the difference might not be very great.
Sure we can throw in all kinds of additional facts that person x might do a, b and c too. yet, if we overly muddy the water, then we might well make no progress in making comparisons and throw up our hands and say that "people can do anything." So we attempt to highlight certain kinds of extremes such as the difference between a person with a $30k income who has organized finances (and perhaps also invests in bitcoin) compared with an unorganized person or perhaps two organized people yet one invests in bitcoin and the other does not. Sure at some point one of them might buy some shitcoin, or even the organized one could have a short phase of being unorganized, yet we still might try to frame certain similarities and only change one or two of the variables even though in real life we are likely to have nuances that may or may not end up averaging out.. or if the person has so many nuances then his scenario might need to be described in a different way in order to make the point.
We could have a guy who consistently invests $100 per week in bitcoin for his first 2 years in bitcoin then consistently invests $200 per week in bitcoin for years 3 and 4 and then he might continue to have variations, and maybe we just project ahead and hold the rate constant at $100 per week and presume that any increases change with promotions and/or cost of living and/or debasement of the dollar, so in the end we are holding the amounts constant as if he were investing 15% into bitcoin from his income. Sometimes we can use percentages or we can use actual numbers in order to try to make our points - even though surely there could be periods of variation or even longer term variation that might have had needed to change based on some real world happening that changes the behaviors.
Even with our own situation.. We might project out our numbers and in the immediate future they are more specific and likely more accurate, and with the passage of time into the future, we likely need to be more ballparkedly in our projections in order to attempt to try to account for a lot of the unknowns.
I have some of my own excel spreadsheets that project into the future, and surely when time passes, the actual numbers get plugged in so then the future projection will be changed based on how the actual numbers get plugged into the spreadsheet as compared with what the projection had shown an estimate rather than an actual number.
Yep.. buyer beware and there seem to be even quite smart people who get sucked into the various scam products, and like you suggested some of them are more scammy than others... yet several of them can be very convincing and end up costing normies a lot of value (including wasting their time and energy too)
That is why I wish we were better at countering FUD and objectively false information even if it is hard to make measures that are hard to corrupt. From what I can observe of the internet platforms, only very specific groups or servers that are well moderated are rejecting misleading information. Here, on X, and many Reddit pages they let users write all kinds of false information and this inevitably leads to many people getting scammed. I don't know the best solution to this, that balances free speech but also protection of the normies. I guess private platforms could do better, but in any case government should not be doing this or we will become very censored and that is even worse than what we have now.
Mostly free information is likely better... but yeah some people get sucked into matters and they are gullible, so it can be difficult to know the extent to which they need to be protected.
Of course we have development going on in terms of individual usage and also various paper products and financialization, and of course, the paperization will likely continue to play out as a kind of attack vector since the powers that be would like to be able to transact on bitcoin, and to ptu obstacles in the ways that individuals can transact on bitcoin without being monitored and/or otherwise controlled.
It is not all lovey dovey since the powers that be want to be able to harness bitcoin, even while they want to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. They would like to have their cake and eat it too.. even though bitcoin has probably advanced farther than they would have had wanted it to advance since it seems that only recently has the attacks transition from direct attacks to cooptation, even though surely ongoing evidence of direct attacks (such as arresting and jailing samurai developers) exists side by side.
I think that the maturity process is happening independently, but challenges are going to come again in different varieties and scale. They are often going to be similar challenges to those of the past, but sometimes they will be newer ones. The battle for privacy and sovereignty is going to happen continuously, and that is the one that we must participate in. If we lose that with Bitcoin, then the whole game is over. I can understand them wanting to coopt large portions of the supply, we can't prevent them from doing that because that is part of the decentralized nature. But we must stop them from limiting some of the key features that Bitcoin has, those that they don't like.
Using bitcoin does seem part of the solution.. but yeah it can be irritating if developers are targeted... and users will be targeted from time to time, too.
If we assume that the ETF data is real and that they are not selling a lot of paper Bitcoin,
These guys are professional manipulators, so you can believe them if you like.
I was not saying that we should assume or believe them, it was part of a conditional statement. If we assume that the data is false, then we can't say that it confirms anything at all since we don't know the degree to which it is false. 10% paper Bitcoin? 100%? 400%? There are huge differences between those metrics.
The estimates are going to vary, and surely some folks have more insight than others, which is part of the reason that they can manipulate.
The creation of various financialized products does increase bitcoin's supply, even if they are using those created products in legally permissive ways and not manipulating the market with them.
There has always been some manipulation, yet the amount can be quite great depending on some of the tactics that are used.... Some of the products might be allowed 12 hours to resolve their balances, and over the weekend they might get 2-3 days... and surely big injustices happen, including BIGGER players getting away with more than others based on their various connections and even there controlling of exchange prices. They have their fingers on all kinds of control mechanisms and pots of money.. and surely at some point we might end up seeing one or more of them blow up like when we saw Terra/Luna blow up and then FTX, Alameda, Blockfi, GBTC, Voyager, Celsius, 3AC and various other blowing up in mid-to-late 2022.. so it can take time for the various corruption to unwind when maybe some BIG ones are implicated and then the contagion ends up hitting a bunch of them. .and frequently retail will pay way more than the executives that caused the corruption.
I am not going to necessarily try to figure out all of the details of what is going on or how it is going on in order to have some pretty good ideas that it is going on and that certain players will sometimes end up getting bailed out.. or maybe their own level of exposure is not as bad as some of the smaller players who might not have had realized that the BIGGER players had actually put the smaller players into such a position that the BIGGER players would get the gains and the smaller players would take the losses when aspects of the thing finally ends up imploding (to the extent that we even find out very many of the details when it does implode).
We have to take Saylor with a grain of salt.. Sure he might be a good guy and all, yet some aspect of what he is doing is getting too BIG for his own britches.
Strategy is too huge, it would be better for everyone if some other companies continue to buy instead and they stop. Better for them, for us and for Bitcoin. Becoming too big causes new systemic risks.
I won't argue with that, and some folks are skeptical that MSTR's situation is being done on purpose and with nefarious purposes... yet there are likely some real world battles going on at the same time between some of the BIG players and MSTR... so it might not be clear regarding the extent to which some nefarious purpose was premeditated or if some nefarious purpose might present itself at a later time, so it was not necessarily premeditated.
Hopefully, he does not end up fucking up in the custody arrangements and/or any backroom dealings that might be happening in and around him.
Yes that is a risk, he does not have that much of experience in these areas to be called an expert so there is a fair chance of someone trying to pull something on it.
Strategy seems to surround itself with some pretty smart people, yet I can also imagine Saylor getting his way, and he does seem competently able to deal with complicated technical matters and consulting with experts on those kinds of topics... but yeah, he is not beyond making mistakes.
He is likely mostly an outsider, and there probably are some status quo financial actors (JP Morgan, Jaime Diamond, et al) who would like Saylor to get wrecked in one way or another, even though we don't necessarily know various aspects of the insiderness/outsiderness and the various ways that pool might be clean or dirty... Saylor does travel with a lot of body guards, even though the last 5.5-ish years, he has been purposefully putting himself in the spotlight, a lot.
These are my thoughts exactly. He may have a big thing going on here, but he is an outsider to the status quo financial actors. Still I am not sure if this is bad or good compared to the alternative. If he was or becomes an insider there, it is a question if he would retain his pro Bitcoin views or he would try to sabotage users in favor of the institutional manipulations.
He does seem to have had been moving further and further away from self-sovereignty aspects of bitcoin, even though many of us realize that the self-sovereignty aspects of bitcoin gives it its value - even though there is an ongoing tension to make money through various aspects of financialization of bitcoin.
Even the Saylor products are complicated, since one thing is attempting to understand the underlying, but then trying to understand the underlying as compared with company stocks or various new financial products that they introduced ,and some of the products that they introduced were innovative in themselves. I have been participating in the MSTR thread since 2020, and still sometimes the new products come out and guys get so excited about them and even asking me why I was participating in the thread yet at the same time not buying the various MSTR products... so yeah, there were even guys kicking themselves for not buying various MSTR products in early 2025, yet they are relieved now, and then they are kicking themselves for not buying Gold and Silver prior to 2025. which yeah, these various ways of investing and/or allocating ourselves is all over the place. I am not going to claim to understand how they all relate to each other even though sometimes they might have positive and/or negative flows in and out of bitcoin, and even if many of us don't really know how so much of these matters relate to each other, we still might adjust our bitcoin position and/or our view and practices related to our bitcoin investment, our cashflow management practices and/or our decisions to get in or out of other assets.. .whether slowly over time or in a trading kind of way.. and I don't tend to like to trade or gamble, even though I have liked bitcoin and I continue to like bitcoin... even while know that there can be extended times that even bitcoin's price performance is confusing when looked at on its own or looked at in terms of various derrivative product and/or macro happenings (related products such as silver and gold).
It does not help at all that there are many kinds of products there, some are similar and others are completely different or new. For helping people understand all the products they should make a simple presentation or something that discusses and compares everything that they are offering. But this kind of clarity and transparency is rare these days. Even if they don't have any duty to do this, it would be a nice thing.
There is probably plenty of information available for anyone wanting to compare and contrast products, even though folks get enticed into products that pay yield, offer tax and accounting benefits and do not put obstacles in the way. Surely aspects of self sovereignty have more and more obstacles and that is one of the ways that states try to lure folks into the paper products and away from directly holding bitcoin... yet if people are transacting directly with bitcoin, then the state is going to continue to battle against that for those who are not connected... so they don't mind tools being available but not to allow those direct transaction tools for the little people.
When it comes to various allocations, I think the general rule is that people should try to buy when the prices are low whatever it is that they are buying. I have known many people who didn't buy silver for years while it was floating around $20 and now they bought at over $100, there were even some pictures of lines of people in some cities trying to buy gold and silver. The idea is to buy low and sell high, and not to buy high and sell low hopefully.
If you accumulate bitcoin over many years, you do not have to trade it.. you just hold onto it as a hedge and potentially sustainably withdraw from it over the years.
Crazy times in regards to people getting arrested in England for their internet activities (hate speech) and also attempts from various European Union to try to enforce their anti-speech laws on Americans who are not in the European Union (through extra-territoriality principles).. which the USA is also a very guilty party when it comes to enforcing USA laws on people outside of the USA.. CZ for example.
Yes, we live in very crazy time and what is even more dangerous is that many Europeans are on board with this or try to minimize the harm. Maybe I missed some threads, but I don't see many Europeans here fighting against these proposal or writing against them it seems they are mostly ignoring them and passively accepting it.
Yes. it is problematic to have more and more attempts to monitor all wealth that people hold, which seems to be more problematic in Europe, yet other governments will take from the same playbook.. since governments seem to love to control and monitor, which surely can be problematic for individuals to figure out ways to deal with those kinds of situations - and not even easy for individuals to figure out ways to get their governments to move in less oppressive directions.
