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The thing about stocks is that they represent ownership in a business with a cash flow. You might be unlucky (having done no research) and buy into a company that goes bankrupt, like buying Nokia shares around the time the iPhone was launched. But if you know nothing about stocks, I would say, just buy into the iShares MSCI ACWI ETF. This is an index of thousands of companies in all countries (including emerging markets) but weighted according to their market cap, e.g. U.S. stocks is probably around 55% of that index, with Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, and TSMC taking up around 15%. All companies who have done quite well in the last few years, and that is basically why they are in that index, i.e. if Apple starts to slip, their ratio of the index should decrease accordingly, and if all Apple’s customers goes to Samsung, Samsung’s ratio in the index should increase (assuming Samsung actually makes a profit from these new customers and thereby increase earnings and their market cap).

How can it be a scam? It has gone up 10x in 6 months, even though many claimed it was a scam, but it just keeps going, so don’t worry, it is not too late for you, buy some HEX today, just $100, worst case, you lose $100, but upside is infinite! But this investment is not for weak hands, DYOR.

Here is Carol Alexander’s take on how you can make money with Bitcoin and Tether on Binance.

I was referring to your question/thread “Will DeFi kill banks?”. As for phone-app: I am referring to NFC-enabled contactless payments via phone, watch, or other wearable device. This is *not* scanning a QR code or similar cumbersome task. Simply hold up your phone/watch in front of the payment terminal, and you have paid. No other actions required. The interchange fee for debit cards in Europe is capped at 0.2% (via regulation), which is why small vendors will generally accept your card even if it is foreign and you are just buying a bottle of water, bus ticket, or ice cream from a street vendor, and with a virtual card from Revolut or Wise, you don’t need to worry about bad exchange rates or fees (for the countries in Europe which have their own currency).

So @Neeranam should probably rephrase his question! ???? Btw: I am still waiting for SCB or any other Thai bank to allow me to put my Thai debit card on my phone or watch, this technology has been mainstream for at least five years, and still not offered by a single Thai bank, so I wouldn’t trust them to know where the puck is going regarding finance…

“Binance has suffered somewhat due to investigations in the US and UK into money laundering and tax offenses. Several banks have banned its customers from sending money to Binance. Similar bans are in effect in China, Japan and Thailand.” As said, this has nothing to do with Bitkub or SCB, and everything to do with Binance operating an unregulated offshore exchange with a shady history. It is probably the largest crypto-exchange in the world, with their own coin currently (according to CoinMarketCap) being the third largest measured in market cap (only eclipsed by Bitcoin and Ethereum). Not very decentralized…

I strive to go against traffic, but sometimes going with traffic provides shading, and then I may compromise. Maybe that is what you are noticing? Also remember, if your observations are from your runs, you will probably pass more people going/running in the opposite direction as you, even though there might actually be less.

SEC Rejects VanEck’s Spot Bitcoin ETF Proposal:

It’s not like we have hundred years of history showing that companies aim for market domination. Regulation is normally what we use to try to limit these monopolities from forming (sometimes more successful than others), it is therefore extremely naive to think that the same things will not happen in an unregulated space (on the contrary, we also have hundred years of history with unregulated finance to learn from). That said, Binance (and Tether) are actually the dominant players in crypto, not Bitkub, and I sincerely doubt that the cease-and-desist that Binance has probably received, has anything to do with Bitkub.

2005: The Million Dollar Homepage. Not sure how he pulled this off without NFTs and blockchain technology ????

This is *very* impressive! Only thing I couldn’t find was a bedside charging station for my phone, but perhaps there are outlets behind the pull-out table?

I did ceiling speakers in bedroom, kitchen, and office, pretty happy with that choice, (bookshelf speakers in living room). For office, if you want speakers there, you also need to consider where you will be sitting. Many will instinctively want to face the view, but if you have a big screen, it might feel better to have the view to the side, instead of behind your screen. And with a screen, consider if sun will be reflected in this screen… There are just so many decisions about every single little thing, and it depends on the individual. A lot though can be changed, but moving a toilet is near impossible, and generally plumbing is fixed in place, so this is probably the first thing you really want to be certain about. Next thing is electricity, placement of switches, think e.g. if you have a living room with an entrance and door to bedroom, you probably want light switch for living room both near the main entrance, and near door to bedroom, so electricity is next thing, and here you get to all the extra cables for speakers, internet, printer, cables for wall mounted TV, etc. Maybe you want freestanding table in your office? So you need an outlet in the floor. So I think I will repeat, get a good architect to help you with this, to get an idea about your requirements. Maybe also decide on a budget ???? And if this is your first customized condo, you will learn a lot in the process that you can use for the next place, or when you renovate it in 10 years… Oh… and I forgot about curtains, I installed electric curtains in my living room, because in Thailand it is not unusual we want to close them in the afternoon, and we have four of them. Another thing is ambient light, I love that stuff, so I have lowered ceilings and cut out a frame for the curtain rail and put in ambient light like the photo below. Oh yeah, and also notice we got gribs on the kitchen cabinet doors below the sink to hold a towel, another details that many kitchen designers forget: A place to put your towels. Also regarding kitchen: Prefer drawers to cabinets, much easier to access stuff in drawers, but they are slightly more expensive, which is why many kitchens use cabinets for most storage.

In the form of what? Just numbers in a database?

You need an architect first, not a contractor/builder. There is just so much personal preference involved in a good design, that no-one can teach you how to do it, but a good architect can ask you the right questions and come up with designs. For example, do you listen to music? So you need a sound system somewhere? You want big loudspeakers on the floor for optimal sound, or you want discrete flush-mounted wall or ceiling speakers for better aesthetics? You want all the wiring for his hidden? You want it connected to your entertainment system? Does your girlfriend need a makeup area with storage space for jewelry and other stuff? Do you need a bathtub? Do you want bathroom connected to bedroom? Maybe ensuite? Do you then also need a dressing area with cabinets so you have a good flow from bed to shower to cabinets? Do you need to store stuff like shaving equipement and soaps in your shower cabin? Do you need a place for a permanent scale in the bathroom? Do you need a laundry basket near your bathroom or bedroom? Do you need a place to put your clothes when you go to sleep? Do you have any office appliances like a printer? Would you like it hidden in a cabinet? And do you need cables for this? Do you need WiFi access points throughout the apartment which are wired with ethernet? Do you need a washing machine and a place for a drying rack? Do you need a place to iron your clothes and maybe a place to store the iron, ironing board, drying rack, and maybe some baskets for clean clothes? There are literally hundreds of questions I could ask you, that would affect the layout.

So bitcoin was invented to prevent people lending money? That is a rather ironic statement with Tether issuing unsecured loans to major players in the crypto ecosystem. As for value, you started another thread stating that crypto now has a $3T market cap. Can you explain where this value exists?

We generally regulate our markets, have oversight, and consumer protection, because many “products” are too complex for the consumer to fully understand, and therefore calculate a fair value. Especially in the realm of finance, because greed make people do stupid things, like take out a mortgage and invest the money in something someone told them was a sure thing and/or FOMO. If too many people do this, we start to have serious systemic risks, just see how many were affected by the global financial crisis of 2007-8, which started with U.S. banks giving loans to people who couldn’t afford them.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation ???? In previous post I called the smart contract a productive asset, but having given it some more thoughts, I think that I was wrong, it resemble a work contract more than a bond, but payment for the work happens by diluting the number of ETH. So yes, if you have 51% of ETH and you stake it all, your ratio of ownership of the entire pool will grow faster than the rest of the ETH holders’. But nothing is produced, and if you only have a small fraction of the total ETH, even if you stake it all and receive new ETH as yield, your ratio of ownership in the entire pool can still shrink. But they have been working on this since at least 2015, so I am sure it will be solid, when they switch to it next year, unless they postpone, like they have done four times in the past…

Mastercard to launch crypto linked payment cards in Asia Pacific. The TL;DR; is that you will be able to get a Mastercard for your Bitkub account. So you deposit THB to Bitkub, you buy BTC for this THB. Then you go to a store and pay with your card. The store gets THB from Mastercard, Mastercard tells Bitkub to sell some of your BTC to reimburse them. All this happens on Bitkub’s central exchange and using the Mastercard rails, nothing touches the blockchain, and you pay commission for exchanging to/from BTC and take a currency risk. Yes, magic times indeed! What exactly is the point of this? Because it has nothing to do with decentralized finance. Also, on CoinBase a user paid ETH to another CoinBase user, but via both’s custodial wallet hosted on CoinBase, i.e. just a database update on a central site, nothing touched the blockchain, and lo and behold, this is apparently worth announcing to r/ethereum and it got more than 2,000 upvotes:

That the cost of running the network should be higher than the value secured, making blockchain useless for bank transfers (as have been claimed in this thread, that it is being used for). Of course there are more than just one reasons. I also see a clear pattern going in circles, the problem seems to be that we are pretty much in agreement on the micro-level, but vehemently disagree about the macro-level implications. For example, we agree about the dynamics of creating yield on the staked ETH (although now you just retracted your previous agreement of what is currency and what is a bond), but not how this actually creates real world value, we agree that it is outrageously expensive to run a blockchain, but not on whether or not users of the chain will end up paying for it, etc.

REMOVED DOUBLE POST

Furthermore, we can now better evaluate past statements about how value is supposedly being created by buying and holding crypto tokens: If what you meant was buying tokens and locking them up in a staking contract, then this is actually not creating value, it is just debasing the currency. E.g. if I issue my own currency and give it to ten people. Then I tell five of them that they can put it in a fixed deposit account that I manage, and I give them 8% interests for this, and those interests are achieved by me simple issuing more currency, then I am not creating value. And yes, I can “destroy” some of the already issued currency to keep the supply stable (your “sound money”), but that just stops the inflation, it still doesn’t create any value.

What you are saying is just that with depreciation the cost for a transaction is much higher than $55. You say you are surprised I do not understand this stuff, because it is simple math: But I started by making a very simple statement about the cost of producing the blockchain being proportional to the security of the chain, and therefore also related to the value protected by the chain. You initially refused to agree with this obvious truth, but after many posts, it seems you do understand it is outrageously expensive to run the chain, and you also seem to understand that it is this high price that keeps it secure. But I don’t know if you have yet come to the conclusion that somebody needs to pay for this? You can do it directly via transfer fees, you can do it indirectly via mining rewards (which in theory puts the cost on all holders instead of those doing the transactions), but regardless of how you do it, somebody needs to pay. Of course you can also subsidize it with VC, which is effectively what is being done by all the retail investors buying crypto tokens as investments, not realizing that they are more or less just paying the electricity bill for the miners.

And yet, a few posts ago, you were the one saying “Close, but no cigar. It’s the ETH that generates the yield, not the smart contract”. For God’s sake, don’t continue to state that the other party is wrong, and when it turns out you are the wrong party, call it all semantic bickering. And it is actually not just semantic bickering, when we know what generates the yield, we can then analyze if that yield is sustainable, or what asset is actually the one that might be in demand, etc. We can’t evaluate things when it’s all just wishy washy hand-wavy stuff.

Good article, but I fail to see how he disagrees with my take, he says: “In staking, the incentive comes from locking up one’s tokens as a performance bond” and lists the steps as: You have ETH ???? You deposit ETH into the staking contract ????‍???? You run staking software honestly ☑️ You earn more ETH (yay!) ???? So having ETH by itself does not give you any cashflow, just like having USD does not give you a cashflow. But locking them up in a staking contract (and running some software) gives you a yield, just like locking up my USD in a government bond (investment contract) provides me with a yield (cashflow). The article even mentions price dynamics, i.e. that staking rewards (yield) will go down, as more people stake their ETH / enter the staking contract. Btw: Given that we are almost on the same page regarding what a productive asset is, would you then agree that bitcoin is an unproductive asset? I know you do not like bitcoin, but indulge me. And if you do agree with this, do you then agree that BTC price increase is based on the greater fool theory?

LOL… I forget how I phrased the question, but it was a rhetorical question meant to point out how stupid this Rube Goldberg machine is… we need to transfer money, so we design L1, but L1 doesn’t work, so we come up with a new system and call it L2, but it requires L1 to work… I wonder, can you actually tell me the downsides with L2? Or do you think it is perfect? What about L1? Any downsides? Or also perfect? It would be a breath of fresh air if we could get a little bit of realism from the proponents.