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Why doesn’t it add up? Apple is trading at 29 times earnings, Amazon is trading at 59 times earning. I personally think Apple is fairly valued and Amazon is overvalued, but then, I sold all my Amazon shares at around $310 because back then I though it was overvalued, only to see them grow their earnings x10. I have not really looked into the company since, but just today I heard they are moving into retail clothing stores, so clearly a company that still hasn’t taken its eye off the ball wrt. growth into “new” markets, and that is probably why people are willing to pay 59 times earnings, because they have a consistent history of growing their cashflow, and as I have told you several times, the stock price is the present value of future cashflow.

So you have no examples to back up your statement that “Crypto is changing the financial markets as we speak”?

Higher interest means more expensive to borrow money. For a company this can lead to less profit (unless they do not need to ever borrow), and for consumers, it means less spending, because car loan, mortgage, etc. will eat more of their disposable income. As stock prices are present value of future cashflow, it makes perfect sense, as the expected higher interest rate is likely to result in lower future cashflow. I believe several banking stocks have actually increased in price, since the interest rate hikes were pushed forward, which again makes sense, because a bank will be able to make more money, if it gets more expensive to lend money.

There is no lost processing power to exploit. If you increase load on the CPU, you also increase power consumption, i.e. drain the battery faster.

Speaking of crypto.com, which resides in Singapore: The Monetary Authority of Singapore is moving to ban all promotions of Digital Payment Tokens services to the general public. Already, all bitcoin ATMs in Singapore have been disabled.

This is from a survey done by Huobi in mid-December involving > 3,000 participants. So probably a majority of these people are currently in the red. Hopefully for them, a bigger wave of new investors will come in 2022 to provide them with much needed exit liquidity, and then in 2023 an even bigger wave will come, ad infinitum.

You can call everything “speculation”. E.g. learning a skill is speculation about whether this skill will be needed in the future. But with stocks and crypto, what are you speculating about? With stocks, your speculation is about the future cashflow of the company, which you can estimate using their quarterly earnings, market research, and possibly company’s own guidance. Remind me, what are we speculating about with crypto? Something about being able to sell to a greater fool?

Any examples? Other than press releases like what OP posted, which is just about the investment arm of SCB that has bought a crypto exchange to make money on fees. That is not changing financial markets, they might as well have bought an amusement park. If crypto is disruptive, what exactly is being disrupted? Who are losing money and customers to crypto?

Knowingly or not, I suspect you are part of a pump’n’dump group. This is EGLD from 15th of November and until today:

Imagine if companies didn’t have to disclose earnings or anything else about themselves or their business, and imagine there was no oversight on banks and they could each print their own money, which could be used to buy stocks. Would you short stocks in such environment? Because that is crypto.

You can think it is worthless without thinking it will go to zero. One very dangerous thing about shorting crypto is how the price can be easily manipulated, as long as people believe that 1 USDT/USDC = 1 USD. There seems to be confirmation that a) you can borrow USDT with crypto assets as security (direct from Tether, if you are big enough), b) you can do leveraged trades up to 125x on Binance, and c) Binance is effectively responsible for the price of most crypto currencies. Utilizing the above, you can create enormous upward pressure on the price, with a relatively small initial investment. But in the process, the amount of stable coins backed by inflated crypto assets ballons, and indeed the supply of stable coins did increase with > 100 billion dollars in 2021 (with non of the issuers willing to submit to an audit). So if you want to short crypto: How long can you stay solvent? For those unfamiliar with shorting, your position may be liquidated if the price increase to a level where you can no longer cover the trade, and so, you will take a loss.

It did sound high, but this was their sales pitch, so it is probably “up to 4%”. It is not being run by Shopee themselves. This is the sign-up page, which doesn’t even have a certificate to secure the connection: http://lgo-shope.me — but notice the very official looking logo ???? The reason they need patsies is most likely because they need verified sales, and if payment is processed through Shopee, they need different bank accounts to make it appear as unique sales. Let’s assume the merchant is selling pure garbage, so anyone who buys will give it one star. But if 80% of sales are fake, that is (8×5 stars + 2×1 star)/10 = 4.2 stars. Probably nobody would suspect a merchant with 4.2 stars of selling pure garbage. So one real sale has to make enough profit to pay commission for four fake sales. If sales price for fake and real is the same, and Shopee takes a 5% commission (just a guess) then four fake sales take 36% of our profit from the real sale, then we have Shopee commission for the real sale, shipping, and the actual thing being sold. All in all, it doesn’t sound unrealistic, that they could turn a profit. But surely it is a volume game, and that is why they are recruiting patsies left and right. And yes, definitely must be against Shopee’s terms of service. Amazon is struggling with similar problems. Some time ago there were stories about people in the U.S. receiving unsolicited packages from China, often containing seeds. This was so that the merchant would have tracking info to submit to Amazon, to make it appear as a legit sale had taken place.

I have now spoken with the person/people/bot who contacted me. It is a scheme to increase sales volume for merchants on Shopee to increase the merchant’s rating. So basically just fake sales. They promised me a 4% commission but I didn’t sign up ????

Just received an unsolicited text message asking if I am worried about not making any income. If so, I can sign up with them and make 3,000 baht per day using my mobile phone. They say they work with Shopee, and if I am interested, I can reach them via LINE. Sounds suspiciously similar to what OP has described. I’ve sent them a message saying I am interested in signing up, maybe I can find out what it is actually about.

I was certainly vocal about bankers who pushed the wrong products onto financially illiterate consumers, and I was vocal (in my own country) about our government, who loosened regulation up to the financial crisis of 2008 (which definitely let to a worse crash then had they not done this). I also interject when people try to tout Tesla as a great investment. So it is not just crypto, but nothing has been as bad as crypto, and crypto isn’t just a bad “investment” pushed onto ignorant people via FOMO, it has a lot of negative externalities, like the absurd amount of energy consumption (contributing to more pollution and global warming), making ransomware a financially succesful business, and having people like Nayib Bukele gamble with the economy of an entire country, and inspiring other would-be dictators to follow suit. Back to inflated real estate: You still don’t seem to understand what I am actually arguing against. A house provides shelter, majority of people need this. Maybe they overpay, but it’s not like millions of people are sold on buying a second and third home that they do not need, in some collective delusion that this will make us all rich. Though occasionally we do have these house bubbles, where people do start to buy second and third homes, because they think they can resell it in the future for a profit, and if anyone is promoting this on a forum I follow, there’s a good chance I will tell them that it is BS. You seemed to be the one who failed to actually read what I wrote, namely that the dividends had paid for my initial purchase, i.e. money invested was repaid by the investment itself (not by a greater fool), and Apple being a real business, my cashflow [from Apple] would not just disappear tomorrow because of a tweet. As for my business, it was creating and selling software.

If you are talking about land or real estate, the former can be used for farming, the latter can be rented out, as people need shelter. Both give the investment a cashflow (income). If you choose to live there yourself, the income is effectively the money you are saving by not having to pay rent to someone else. You are right that you can invest in non-productive assets, and profit when you resell. Generally though, investing in non-productive assets is risky, as you are betting on the future supply/demand ratio to fall, but if this was a safe bet, it should already be priced in, minus storage cost and discount for capital outlay.

Several were doomed to fail from the start, many predicted this. That is the parallel I am drawing: If your business has no way to generate money, it won’t last forever, even if you raise millions on the open markets. Is Richard Heart’s HEX coin just a high risk investment that might turn out to make all investors rich? Or is it a cleverly disguised ponzi scheme? You are confusing it with the Great Depression. Do you think front running, wildcat banks, bucket shops, money laundering, and ponzi schemes should be legal? As for following the law, what law should they follow? Several countries already disallow many aspects of crypto. My personal gains are irrelevant for this discussion, and why should you believe any claims I make about myself anyway? But if you must know, your numbers are too low. But I was already wealthy when I invested in Apple, money I had made from operating a succesful business.

I believe the issue here is that Thai banks do not support Google Pay (and Apple Pay for that matter). But you should still be able to use your phone in Thailand to pay with a non-Thai card. Furthermore, to elaborate on another post, you can get a card from Curve. This is a “wrapper” card, so anything charged to that card, will simply charge an underlying card, which can be your Thai VISA/MasterCard, and you can then add your Curve card to your phone. I should add that while I do have a Curve card, that I added to Apple Pay, and I also added my Krungthai MasterCard to Curve, I have not yet tested it in Thailand, as I haven’t been there since the lockdown. But any device in Thailand where you can use contactless payments/NFC (which they call PayWave), should accept your Google/Apple Pay.

DotCom and penny stocks created a lot of money for people, until they didn’t. Enron created a lot of money for people, until they didn’t. Subprime mortgages created a lot of money for people, until they didn’t. Bernie Madoff created a lot of money for people, until he didn’t. BitConnect and OneCoin created a lot of money for people, until they didn’t. Elizabeth Holmes created a lot of money for people, until she didn’t. Crypto is creating a lot of money for people, but no-one can explain where the money are coming from, but I am sure this time it will be different. And I don’t think anyone is throwing rocks. Only questioning the business model and sustainability of it, just like the schemes listed above were also questioned before they collapsed, and it turned out, the value was not there.

It wasn’t really you explaining it to me in painful details, it was me having to explain to you, that being able to stake your ETH does not make ETH itself a productive asset. And we never got to discuss the staking scheme itself, as those which just issue or redistribute coins, are not generating value, that is still zero sum, although if the staker is validating transactions, then work is actually performed, and compensation is in order, so here you can talk about a real cashflow. But not a sustainable mechanism to make the coins themselves increase in value. If you want, I can point you to articles by intelligent people who make such statements. But this was an attempt of constructive discussions, not a flame war. Had you actually read the article, you would have found that this is not “all he does” or what he claims. You have previously been bullish on dApps, and Moxie look at the current ecosystem for these, and creates one. I would have expected you to show more interest. You didn’t read an objective article from a respected cryptographer and entrepreneur who actually wrote a dApp and created an NFT to test the current state of affairs, instead you read the response from someone who has over a billion riding on the succes of Ethereum. I think that says a lot about the blinders you are walking around with. And Vitalik’s response? It is basically that the criticism is correct, but that this is only because we are in the early stages, soon it will be much better, it is just lack of funding, this despite billions having been poured into the ecosystem and the technology being a decade old. It is also completely ignoring the points raised by Moxie about why natural evolution will not lead to the scenario envisioned by many crypto-proponents (of getting away from centralization).

The point wasn’t how much money I have made, the point was that if I sell Apple shares today, my profit from having held Apple, is not funded by the next buyer. It was funded by the economic activity of the underlying business. And the next buyer can hold these shares for 31 years, and with no growth in Apple’s business, they will still have made back their money from the underlying cashflow that they bought from me. You can’t say this about crypto, therefore you cannot compare stocks with crypto. End of argument.

The problem is that these people who allegedly get it are unable to explain basic stuff like how it creates value, and seem very confused about other parts of the economy. Anyway, I know you get many of the technical aspects of how the technology works, so setting aside the question about economic value, I came across this article by renowned cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike (founder of the Signal messaging platform). His conclusion/findings is that all this talk about “decentralized” is just talk, in actuality it is all very much centralized (as you and I have also briefly touched upon before about custodial wallets), and his thesis is that it will remain centralized (because centralized solutions will always be superior to distributed solutions that require consensus around a protocol, he mentions that already royalties for NFTs is an OpenSea extension). He also brings up lack of hash commitment for the NFT data, so it can be changed at will, how OpenSea was able to effectively revoke his NFT even though it was stored in his MetaMask wallet, etc. So I wonder, if you read the linked article, would you say Moxie is just among the people who doesn’t get it?

The problem when your investment is in a non-productive speculative asset that has no final consumer, any value above zero is basically overvalued, so when to take profit?

Here’s how many uses bitcoin, less than 3 per second, not really seeing increased adoption, despite ATH valuation a few months. Of course if you understand economics, you understand that price of a currency is unrelated to the number of transactions. Bitcoin itself provides nothing that gives it value. The value provided by the network is paid for via mining fees (and issuing new coins, that, in theory, devalue all existing coins), not by increasing the price of the coins moved.

Regarding bitcoin as a currency: It was used on Silk Road, and they provided escrow between buyer and seller. But even back then (when BTC was < $1,000) the volatility was too big of a problem, so the escrow service would immediately sell the BTC for USD on Mt.Gox and then hold USD in escrow. If you understand economy, you should understand that BTC will always be extremely volatile (unless it goes to zero), and nobody wants to use a medium of exchange that keeps changing value relative to their expenses.