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Most of the world had lockdowns, most of the world have low interests (negative in parts of Europe), and at least some countries in Europe also gave out stimulus money. So I wouldn’t say my points are U.S. based, granted it’s easier to reason about the U.S. because we know more about what happens there, than e.g. in India, Russia, or China, but clearly the latter 3 also have problems with crypto, given that they all have/will ban it. And as for global, take OneCoin which was a ponzi that peaked in 2017 and I think had majority of “investors” outside the U.S., or BitConnect which had their infamous ceremony in Pattaya also in 2017. Both were of course obvious scams, but riding the global crypto FOMO. I actually think it is one of the contributing factors to prolonging the eventual collapse: We have coins where “diamond hands” are rewarded for holding: The longer they hold, the higher the reward, though often the reward is either redistributing coins from “weak hands” or simply issuing new coins, so no actual value is generated, best case, it’s just redistributing (coins), worst-case, it’s effectively paying people to hold the coins by printing more of the same coin, diluting it in the process. Some of these schemes are more complex, some even involve multiple coins, so many people don’t realize that of course they can’t get richer by buying and holding a worthless coin, or they may think that they will hold longer than anyone else, so it becomes an endurance game, but as long as buyers are holding, in theory, the price shouldn’t go down (since price is based on last trade), and the staking rewards or yield, are motivating people to hold. Some of this stuff is probably also contributing to the inflated valuations, for example if I transfer 10 BTC to Celsius Network, I receive 7-8% interest, and if I then spend that on buying new bitcoins, am I buying my own bitcoins at a higher price? And what if I then also transfer these new ones to Celsius Network. This can go on ad infinitum. I.e. this is unregulated fractional reserve banking but with no reserve requirements or oversight/auditrs, and in fact, these institutions can just print new coins to pay lenders, e.g. on Celsius Network you can get your interests in the CEL token, but I don’t think anyone is liable for redeeming that token for anything of value…

It wasn’t until December 2020 that BTC again reached the ATH of December 2017, so 3 years. But let’s look at what happened in 2020: Lots of lockdowns, so limited options for spending money, zero or even negative interests on your bank account deposit, adding to that, governments were literally sending free money to citizens. Combine that with people sitting at home and reading Discord about DeFi or /r/wallstreetbets, and the conditions could hardly be better for people taking their stimulus cheque (and more) and put it into crypto. Furthermore, we started to see stable coins being pumped into the ecosystem (billions of dollars worth per week), and exchanges offering trading at 125x leverage. This is a way to boost demand significantly, but with nothing real backing it. It’s ironic because many crypto proponents love to talk about getting away from USD because of how the Fed can just “print money”, but they have recreated a system where they are doing the same, but with no oversight, regulation, transparency, and when the Fed “prints money” it’s a liability for the Fed that has to be met in the future, but Tether or any of the handful of other stable coin issuers could disappear tomorrow and take all their paper liabilities with them. I feel bad for people losing money on crypto (or anything else), less so for OP, he took a semi-informed gamble and seems to have plenty of money to risk on this. The problem is with the people who are uninformed and bet money they can’t afford to lose, and the longer this goes on, the more people will end up hurt. So in that sense, I hope it collapses sooner rather than later, not because of schadenfreude, but because the longer it lasts, the more people will be hurt ???? There is also the enormous waste of energy in a time where we are dealing with both climate change and surging energy prices. All this proof-of-work is contributing factors to both, but doing zero good for society, on the contrary, and it also contributes to price surges for gamers.

In all fairness, OP bought BTC with the sole purpose of selling at a profit and then started a thread about it, so he has basically invited people to track and comment on his gain/loss using the current market value of his “investment”.

Sorry, @OneZero is right that I meant Neeranam. He is the OP in most crypto threads, but not this one ????

I have OP on ignore, but before that, he was all over the place. Pumping EGLD at $250 or so, and then boasting when it hit $300-400, but a month later when it was down to $135: Oh… he had already taken profit long ago, yet it was still a great investment… Anyway, OP probably arrived at his returns by assuming the USD had 15% yearly inflation over the last decade, which he can prove to you, if only you will watch fifteen minutes of ramblings from one of his idols…

Haha… what OP still doesn’t seem to understand is that to keep prices up, we need constant inflow of new money which is larger than the outflow, and mining alone is a huge drain on the system, although many U.S. miners are actually holding their coins and building up debt to finance their operations, instead of selling their coins, but as it gets more expensive to borrow, or as the risk is just too high (having that much debt on your balance sheet), they will be forced to sell. Also, who are all these institutional investors? I think it’s just Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, and maybe Jack Dorsey. I would be pretty scared if retirement funds are buying into crypto, because then we are definitely headed toward another global financial crisis, though latest reports from IMF says we are not yet where crypto is posing a systemic risk, although we are getting closer, especially in developing economies (but that is mainly from retail investor activity, i.e. mortgaging your farm to invest in Axie Infinity). And one thing that indicates “real” investors do not like crypto: Coinbase is trading at a P/E below 20, and the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust is trading at a discount of about 27% compared to their NAV.

Normally when using the word “speculation” about stocks, it is when fundamentals does not match the price. For example, I don’t see anything that justifies Tesla’s current stock price, other than speculation about them becoming one of the dominant players within the next decade and selling close to 10 million cars per year at a good margin. It could happen, but there are many unknowns, so to me, this is a speculative bet. But there are many large, well-established, and financially sound companies that have operated for many years and that have dependable earnings, often paying dividends to investors. Buying stocks in these companies is not really speculation, as they will post quarterly earnings and give guidance about next quarter, with their projected future earnings often just a small percentage higher than their last earnings, consistent with their long history of operation.

I just need one example of a problem it solves. I have heard “banking the unbanked” before, but that is the vague talk I was referring to. The IMF did a case study looking at, amongst others, illegal immigrants doing remittance and found that crypto currency makes it neither cheaper nor easier for immigrants to move their money back to their families. I even have a friend who is pro-Bitcoin and spent a year in Africa where he tried to help some workers transfer money via LocalBitcoins instead of Western Union, because he thought WU was “raping them” (his words), but his efforts were futile, because selling bitcoins in e.g. Zimbabwe, that you received from your husband that works abroad, comes with both risk, fees, and a lot of hassle, when you are one of these unbanked people. There are specific things the banks don’t want. For example, they don’t want their customer’s transactions on a public blockchain, they don’t want to lose the ability to reverse errornous/fraudulent transactions, they don’t want a system where chain splits can cause temporary double spend, etc. But they would love to charge you a fee for facilitating a crypto asset sale or charge you custody fees for holding your assets for you, and that is what we are seeing, pretty much all the stuff OP is posting about banks investing in crypto, is really banks investing in companies that sells shovels to gold diggers. Also, about the unbanked, this thread is about BH investing in Nubank, which is banking the unbanked in Latin America, and they do not need any crypto currency or blockchain for this, just a mobile app and an ATM network.

As @Airalee already said, real estate does produce a cashflow (income) from renting it out (to people who need shelter or commercial space) or if you have a farm, the produce that can grown, harvested, and sold. But just to add: We do have periods where real estate does become a game of chasing the greater fool, those are the speculative bubbles, where people buy a second home, not because they need it, but because they think that in two years, they can sell it at a profit. In the initial phase, prices do go up, because demand increase faster than supply, though that demand is artificial, as people buy more houses than they actually need, and meanwhile, property developers will see rising prices and be motivated to build more, making the eventual collapse worse. And back to your original question: Investing in real estate can be many things, e.g. there is also a lot of construction of new houses for new families, or building shopping malls, etc. that falls into this category. It is generally not just to buy up a lot of real estate, sit on it, and then sell for a profit in 5+ years.

Can you give some examples? What problems are they solving better than existing solutions? And please be specific, not just the usual vague talking points about smart contracts, removing the middleman, reducing cost, etc. Because of all the hype, central banks have been forced to actually take this serious, with the U.K. releasing a report calling it a solution in search of a problem, I.e. there are absolutely no reason why they would do this. Banking is already digital, and as long as we have trusted actors (like central banks), there is no need for consensus protocols and blockchains. In fact, public ledgers is the last thing banks and their customers want. Right, we want all that information on public blockchains… not! Also, several countries and some states have already digitized these things, it doesn’t require blockchain, crypto currencies, or NFTs.

You understand that being able to dispute a charge on your credit card and have it reversed, say you ordered something online, and the seller does not deliver, is a design feature, right? And what does irreversibility have to do with transaction speed anyway?

I don’t think Blackrock would willingly underwrite a ponzi, no. Nor did I say anything like that. But now that you bring up this tangent, I do think that Michael Saylor is a person of very questionable ethics. His company (MicroStrategy) has previously been fined by the SEC for fraud, and he has literally said that the most important thing you can do is to spend all your money on bitcoin, mortgage your house to buy more bitcoins, and when you are out of credit, convince your friends and family to buy bitcoins. This is cult-level rhetoric, but earlier in this thread, it was brought up how “large cap” companies buy Bitcoin. Really, it is people like Michael Saylor and Elon Musk who buy them via their company positions, nothing more, and it is not an endorsement, if you know a little about these people.

It might be “the most it has ever been”, but it is barely regulated in most Western countries. And regulated crypto is an oxymoron. The entire reason we waste all these resources doing proof-of-work, which makes blockchains slow and unscalable, is because we want the regulatory arbitrage. Already crypto is more expensive and slower than the system it wants to replace. Add KYC requirements and AML screening, and I fail to see why anyone would use this over existing financial institutions. Granted, today crypto is already heavily centralized, and the big players (like Coinbase) do some KYC, and the exchanges and market places work together on censoring crypto assets (like stolen tokens, NFTs minted from copyrighted materials, etc.). So I guess, as long as people think that “number goes up”, they will continue to participate.

This is because your bank sucks. Thailand can do domestic instant transfers and have done for as long as I can remember. Pan-European instant payments (SEPA) were enabled in 2017, and closed-loop systems like PayPal has done cross-border instant payments since the early 2000s. Cryptocurrencies adds nothing new here, on the contrary, majority of cryptocurrencies are much slower than “modern” banking, have higher fees, and takes up enormous amounts of energy.

You are conflating two things: The network has value, yes! That is why people are currently paying the network operators around $1.5 worth of BTC per transaction done on the network, and further reward the operators with mining rewards paid collectively by the bitcoin holders by diluting the pool of bitcoins and giving the new ones to the miners. But this does not give the “token” itself much value: It is an access token to the network, but you still pay per transaction, so ideally, if the network actually did provide value, and the access token gets too expensive, competition should cause someone else to do a new network providing the same service, but for a cheaper fee/access token. Unfortunately though, the value the networks provide is questionable, but we do see a lot of new networks and tokens appear all the time, though it’s because of the speculation, rather than the services they provide.

This does not exclude it being a ponzi, and furthermore, the finite amount is pretty questionable. Yes, there will only be 21 million bitcoins, but then we have a handful of forks, each adding another 21 million, and then we have split one bitcoin into 100 million satoshis, so multiplying by 100 million, and then we actually trade bitcoin in USDT and other stable coins, which seems to have near infinite supply without anything backing them, and then we have MicroStrategy as a proxy for buying bitcoins, which can issue infinite stocks, etc. But what does it even mean? It is just numbers, nothing underlies it, no value generated, and that is why it resembles a ponzi so much.

One can certainly make the argument that the debt which the U.S. builds up is unsustainable and sooner or later, they will be unable to service it, and if they do, the USD will “collapse” because nobody wants to hold U.S. treasury bills, bonds, and notes, if it seems the issuer is about to default. But that day is not today, nor does this make it a scam. It is no different than Evergrande or any other company which builds up debt faster than what is supported by the underlying economic activity. So you could make the headline: U.S. growth and tax revenue does not keep up with the pace with which the U.S. treasury issues debt, therefore we think sooner or later, the U.S. will be unable to pay interests on their debt or will miss a payment, casing the USD to fall in value. But with that headline it is suddenly clear that USD is very different from crypto currencies, and escaping USD by buying crypto assets, in the belief that the U.S. government is soon to collapse, is just foolish, because you are buying something which has no value and no cashflow, and is still denominated in USD…

What a ridiculous premise that title is. A ponzi is when you lure in new investors by pretending you have a business scheme going, but in fact, the money they “invest”, is used to pay a return to earlier investors. How does that map to the USD? E.g. the last time I bought USD, were the EURs I paid distributed to earlier investors that were promised some absurd yield? Btw: Why is it I still have to read these stupid titles from OP when I have him on my ignore list?

As always with OP, there might be smoke but no fire: The bank’s main trade is credit and debit services, Nubank also runs an investment platform called NuInvest, which allows users to invest money in a Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund (ETF). However […] the company’s prospectus doesn’t mention revenues or products built on cryptocurrency So basically the bank allows customers to pay them in fiat to buy Bitcoin certificates that can probably only be traded back for fiat on the NuInvest platform, again paying a fee to the bank in fiat…

It should be good for the dollar, because dollar savings will yield higher interest compared to e.g. EUR savings. But it is bad for U.S. equities, because it gets more expensive to borrow money (and therefore it might indirectly be bad for USD if there are foreign investors who exit the U.S. market, or U.S. investors who look elsewhere for investments). But that is looking at things in a vacuum, other countries will also take measures to fight inflation, and markets are complex with everything being about what everyone else thinks will happen over the next 3 months… so it’s rarely as simple as cause and effect, although occasionally we get these “shocks” where suddenly the entire sentiment changes, and then everyone wants out of tech stocks or what have you…

Everyone should know that there will be no “surge” of tourists coming to Thailand, we already have the numbers from their previous Test & Go scheme, and new numbers would be expected to come in lower, because now Test & Go is more cumbersome/expensive, and there is now precedence for Thailand just suddenly shutting down the scheme with little information given to ticket holders about if and when they can go, plus all the bad PR about people arriving and being forced into self-paid quarantine and getting their vacation ruined, either because they tested positive, or was in a group with someone who did. More likely, money are flowing out of European and U.S. equities (as we can see, with equities down YTD) and into emerging markets (like Thailand). Look at the MSCI Thailand Index and it’s up 5.83% this year (in EUR).

And what determines the future exchange rate? Sure, speculation happens, but mostly when fundamentals are out of whack with actual prices. E.g. if you currently think baht is overvalued, you would take out a billion baht loan and then pay it back when the baht has decreased in value to reflect actual demand. Speculating about a currency going up, if there is no actual demand, is a bit foolish, because if the price gets too high, and it starts to hurt the Thai export, the Central Bank of Thailand can just print a few billion baht and sell into the market for EUR, USD, or JPY. Speculating on a currency going down is “safer” because here intervention from the Central Bank will require them to have enough currency reserves to keep the price from falling below their target. The Central Bank of Thailand though have $250bn worth of foreign currency in their reserves, so I wouldn’t go one on one with them. I am not sure what you mean by “speculators”. Sure, when you buy a stock, you are “speculating” about the future cashflow of the company, but based on the last few quarterly earning reports, company’s own guidance, and macroeconomic news. Of course if you are day trading, you are participating in a Keynesian beauty contest, because you just don’t have enough up-to-date information, so that field is more about speculation.

I know they are forcing all arrivals to pay for two PCR tests and quarantine hotel, but we are talking about at most 50,000 people. It is their exports which drives demand for their currency, not currently tourism. Somewhat surprisingly, GDP only fell 6% in 2020 where the country was shut down and trade surplus increased to $25bn. Though a contributing factor to the increased surplus could be decreased imports, and I am not sure how much their stimulis packages factor into GDP, I have not dug into the numbers.

Neither are many foreigners. Seriously, our former chairman and vice-chairman were foreigners and some of the most unethical, selfish, and fiscally irresponsible people, and had no clue about how to run a building. Thailand doesn’t always attract the best people.

You gotta start somewhere, learning what is the law is a good first step, learning, by going to the Land Office, what has been filed about your condo, is a good second step. If you actually did learn about the system, you would not complain that Land Office can’t punish, because that is absolutely not their role in this. And while you can argue the court is slow/useless, the Land Office will respect you registering a new committee, if done according to the rules, the bank will respect your ownership of the bank account, if you have the proper registration from the Land Office, and developer has no legal right to object if you turn off their utilities for 6 months of non-payment, and you can charge them interests (if stated in your bylaws, limits explained in Condo Act) and even a fee to re-enable utilities. So there is plenty you can do, if you just learn about how the system works, before you have to involve the courts.