I just bought $200,000 of Bitcoin

[Whale]

That made me laugh, they have someone serious like Greg Foss who puts his opinion (which was an opinion on what "may" happen if bonds continue to be financially pathetic) and then at the very end they run an ad for "Bulltiverse" which is a completely pathetic attempt at money making IMHO. Sometimes I wonder if Youtube crypto channels are their own worst enemy, they just are just using the crypto to run adverts (any old sheit ads). 

[happydreamer]

19 hours ago, lkn said:

If we rewind a little, I said, it had been 13 years, and still no mainstream merchants were accepting bitcoin. You (or maybe someone else) brought up PayPal, and I am pointing out, that this is not actually “mainstream merchants accepting bitcoin”.

 

That said, please do enligthen me, since someone else said that bitcoin is better than the old system; what new possibilities will bitcoin bring to PayPal? Bitcoin payments are slower and (for your typical payment) more expensive than what PayPal already offer.

I brought up PayPal since it is one of the most widely used payment gateways USED by mainstream every day merchants throughout the world.  Hundreds of thousands of online businesses use PayPal to facilitate payments.  How do you not consider this mainstream when nearly every online retailer accepts it?

 

As far as BTC being better?  I'm not quite sure it's better.  But it's an alternative form of payment.  

 

I develop websites and cloud-based applications professionally.  Thats my day job.  Professionally for the past 25 years.  My consulting agency works with dozens of online retailers (globally) who use PayPal, Square, Stripe, Apple Pay, and Zelle to facilitate currency transferring hands from one party to another.  Some of my clients are what are consider high-risk vendors.  That is to say they have an above average occurrence of chargebacks which in the online retail business hurts your seller score and can get you kicked off a payment gateway really quickly.  When that happens you can no longer accept payments for your products and you're left with no alternatives because the payment gateways will always side with the buyer before the seller.  

 

There's an abnormally high amount of people out there that try and scam retailers all the time saying they never received merchandise when indeed, merchandise is received and verified with proof of tracking and delivery record.  

 

You know what?  PayPal and Visa don't give a hog's fat ass about it.  Both will revoke your selling privileges regardless of if you can provide proof of delivery or not.  All they care about is the chargeback and if they are in jeopardy of having to reimburse that client for (in the case of my clients) thousands of dollars worth of merchandise drop shipped from other areas of the world.  

 

For the sake of the example above let's remove BTC from PayPal and just say for instance seller accepts BTC for purchase through use of transfer from wallet address to wallet address.

 

Do you see how this problem now goes away if PayPal, stripe, or Visa decides to pull the rug from a vendor?

 

Now put PayPal back into the equation and say they act as a gateway for crypto transfer and buyer claims they never received a product?  Is there a chargeback then?  We don't know yet.  It's new technology.  But it certainly is hopeful for sellers who are in this position.

 

And BTW...Paypal charges 3 - 4% for transactions done on their network.  Where have you seen BTC transaction cost more than this?  Maybe you're thinking of the gas fees associated with Ether, but certainly not BTC.  

 

Anyhow...this is what I mean when I say that those without the technical background to substantiate their claims know very little about the possibilities and use cases for crypto currency.  You don't know what you don't know.  You can only view it from a surface standpoint and not  a use case scenario

[ChrisP24]

One of the most interesting quotes to ponder (IMO) from that Gregg Foss video was "when you own bitcoin you have a short position on sovereign debt"

[Sparktrader]

[Sparktrader]

Next move over 41k off

[lkn]

20 hours ago, happydreamer said:

How do you not consider this mainstream when nearly every online retailer accepts it?

I repeat, no mainstream merchant is accepting bitcoin. PayPal is not accepting your bitcoins. If I sell via PayPal, I will not be accepting your bitcoins.

 

20 hours ago, happydreamer said:

As far as BTC being better?  I'm not quite sure it's better

Right, it is not better. And that is why VISA and Mastercard are still the mainstream payment methods, even after 13 years.

 

20 hours ago, happydreamer said:

[…] have an above average occurrence of chargebacks which in the online retail business hurts your seller score and can get you kicked off a payment gateway really quickly […] let's remove BTC from PayPal and just say for instance seller accepts BTC for purchase through use of transfer from wallet address to wallet address.

 

Do you see how this problem now goes away if PayPal, stripe, or Visa decides to pull the rug from a vendor?

On the surface, yes, I follow your argument. But which consumer will send money to an unknown internet merchant if there is no recourse incase of fraud?

 

We already know from some of the market places that does use crypto currencies that this does not work, and the market place will introduce an escrow service (that cost extra) to protect consumers (and merchants). And now we are back to your PayPal, Stripe, etc. scenario: If the consumer complains, will the market place side with the consumer or the merchant? Will the merchant be kicked off the market place if there are too many complaints?

 

Also, while you may work with ethical merchants (engaged in drop shipping ????) and only see the fraudulent buyers, there are probably even more fraudulent sellers. I don’t know if you saw the thread on this forum where a poster asked about his Thai friend who received money and just had to pass them on, taking a small cut: That seemed to be fake sales boosting merchant reputation on Shopee.

 

20 hours ago, happydreamer said:

Now put PayPal back into the equation and say they act as a gateway for crypto transfer and buyer claims they never received a product?  Is there a chargeback then?  We don't know yet.  It's new technology.  But it certainly is hopeful for sellers who are in this position.

If payment processors wanted to get rid of chargebacks, they could. You don’t need crypto for that. But as said, chargebacks are meant for consumer protection. Unfortunately I am not privy to the actual numbers, but I am almost certain that regular consumers do not engage in mass chargebacks, banks don’t allow that. More likely, the chargebacks your merchants are seeing is because stolen credit cards were used.

 

Here you can definitely fault the credit card industry for not having solved this problem yet. I actually find it a bit strange that it is still a problem, because my cards have been using 3DSecure (or another form of 2FA) for many years.

 

20 hours ago, happydreamer said:

And BTW...Paypal charges 3 - 4% for transactions done on their network.  Where have you seen BTC transaction cost more than this?  Maybe you're thinking of the gas fees associated with Ether, but certainly not BTC.

No, I am thinking of the actual cost to PayPal. It does not cost PayPal 3-4% to facilitate a payment, in fact, in Europe we have (by law) capped interchange fees at something like 0.11%, so that is much closer to PayPal’s actual expenses dealing with VISA and Mastercard (for European payments).

 

Domestically I have been told (by someone who works in the payment card industry) that retail stores on average pay around 0.12% for card payments (all fees included).

 

Bitcoin fees are hard to reason about, because the faster you want your payment to go through, the more you have to pay, and the more people who use the network, the higher the price gets. So shopping in rush hour in a post-adoption world would probably see double or even tripple digit fees.

 

Plus people forget that the mining reward really should be included in the cost of doing transactions, currently shared among all bitcoin holders as a hidden tax.

 

20 hours ago, happydreamer said:

You can only view it from a surface standpoint and not  a use case scenario

Sounds good, but the fact is, bitcoin / blockchain is just an extremely inefficient (and expensive to run) database. This really cripples it, i.e. expensive and slow transactions, and require constant internet connectivity, plus phones do not have enough storage to validate the chain themselves, so they will need to go via custodial wallets.

 

All this is done so that we do not need a central authority. So it will never be a better payment system for people who trust a central authority. This is just a fact! It could be a better payment system for people who cannot trust a central authority, i.e. a good censor resilient payment network, but majority of people do not need this, and, as we have seen countless times, bitcoin (and other aspects of the crypto currency ecosystem) is controlled by a few big players, take e.g. Binance who said they wouldn’t take cards from Russian banks (so that’s 70% of trading activity which is now unavailable to Russians), and we have seen hard forks in the past because all miners agreed about it, and we have seen BlockFi, Coinbase and others reject “tainted” coins, i.e. coins obtained via illicit activity, and also introduced AML/KYC procedures, so all the “advantages” of wild west banking are slowly eroding, and we are left with the question, why on Earth are we still using a blockchain? Of course we already see several less distributed chains appear, because they are faster and cheaper to run. For example, is the Binance Smart Chain or Solana really decentralized censor resilient chains?

[Sparktrader]

On 3/5/2022 at 6:02 AM, ChrisP24 said:

Thanks Neeranam.  It took me a while to digest your post, but based on it I checked out crypto.com and its cards, and then ultimately decided to open a debit card with Coinbase (just completed today), in part because I already had a CB account and CB wallet set up, and in part because CB is based in the U.S. vs. crypto.com being based in Hong Kong.  The CB debit card offers 4% back paid in your choice of stellar lumens (XLM), The Graph (GRT), Ampleforth (AMPL) or Rally (RLY), plus some others but the others are only a 1% reward.   I picked XLM, just because I previously had a very small position in it.  There are no fees as long as the card is drawing against available US dollar or USDC coin balances.  I take it that you either came from or have ties to the U.K.?

 

I am an old guy too (58), and my financial goalposts, like yours, have moved.  I retired last year, but am having difficulty adjusting my financial mindset to a "decumulation" setting.   Instead I am being more conservative by living just from income generated by investments, while also still trying to steadily grow my asset base.  I'm being very careful right now because I'm in a two-year gap period before a military pension and military-sponsored family health coverage kick in at age 60, and then U.S. social security at age 62.  I've been an active options trader for many years, mostly in options on index ETFs but with some on individual stocks also (covered calls and equivalent), with some other retirement-oriented investments that I don't plan to touch for the foreseeable future.  Thus far have been able to generate both income and some degree of growth, although of course the markets are down modestly since January.

 

Have not gotten into staking yet as I don't want to lock up capital in crypto, but am loosely following development in etherium as it shifts over to a proof of stake model, and also etherium is primarily what I have been mining (but converting most to bitcoin).  

 

In any event, thank you very much for the tip.  I have kids in school also, so a lot of expenses that can be run through the card.  I don't think I'll accumulate much XLM but rather convert most of it to BTC and ETH unless and until I manage to overcome my current level of ignorance on the various altcoins, or more aptly develop some degree of confidence as to which ones have a good likelihood of growth. 

 

Also congratulations to you on figuring out so much of the crypto world ahead of the main pack, so that you've benefited and actually changed your life circumstance as later-adopters moved values so explosively upward. 

 

 

Atomic wallet good staking

[Sparktrader]

3 minutes ago, lkn said:

I repeat, no mainstream merchant is accepting bitcoin. PayPal is not accepting your bitcoins. If I sell via PayPal, I will not be accepting your bitcoins.

 

Right, it is not better. And that is why VISA and Mastercard are still the mainstream payment methods, even after 13 years.

 

On the surface, yes, I follow your argument. But which consumer will send money to an unknown internet merchant if there is no recourse incase of fraud?

 

We already know from some of the market places that does use crypto currencies that this does not work, and the market place will introduce an escrow service (that cost extra) to protect consumers (and merchants). And now we are back to your PayPal, Stripe, etc. scenario: If the consumer complains, will the market place side with the consumer or the merchant? Will the merchant be kicked off the market place if there are too many complaints?

 

Also, while you may work with ethical merchants (engaged in drop shipping ????) and only see the fraudulent buyers, there are probably even more fraudulent sellers. I don’t know if you saw the thread on this forum where a poster asked about his Thai friend who received money and just had to pass them on, taking a small cut: That seemed to be fake sales boosting merchant reputation on Shopee.

 

If PayPal wanted to get rid of payment processors wanted to get rid of chargebacks, they could. You don’t need crypto for that. But as said, chargebacks are meant for consumer protection. Unfortunately I am not privy to the actual numbers, but I am almost certain that regular consumers do not engage in mass chargebacks, banks don’t allow that. More likely, the chargebacks your merchants are seeing is because stolen credit cards were used.

 

Here you can definitely fault the credit card industry for not having solved this problem yet. I actually find it a bit strange that it is still a problem, because my cards have been using 3DSecure (or another form of 2FA) for many years.

 

No, I am thinking of the actual cost to PayPal. It does not cost PayPal 3-4% to facilitate a payment, in fact, in Europe we have (by law) capped interchange fees at something like 0.11%, so that is much closer to PayPal’s actual expenses dealing with VISA and Mastercard (for European payments).

 

Domestically I have been told (by someone who works in the payment card industry) that retail stores on average pay around 0.12% for card payments (all fees included).

 

Bitcoin fees are hard to reason about, because the faster you want your payment to go through, the more you have to pay, and the more people who use the network, the higher the price gets. So shopping in rush hour in a post-adoption world would probably see double or even tripple digit fees.

 

Plus people forget that the mining reward really should be included in the cost of doing transactions, currently shared among all bitcoin holders as a hidden tax.

 

Sounds good, but the fact is, bitcoin / blockchain is just an extremely inefficient (and expensive to run) database. This really cripples it, i.e. expensive and slow transactions, and require constant internet connectivity, plus phones do not have enough storage to validate the chain themselves, so they will need to go via custodial wallets.

 

All this is done so that we do not need a central authority. So it will never be a better payment system for people who trust a central authority. This is just a fact! It could be a better payment system for people who cannot trust a central authority, i.e. a good censor resilient payment network, but majority of people do not need this, and, as we have seen countless times, bitcoin (and other aspects of the crypto currency ecosystem) is controlled by a few big players, take e.g. Binance who said they wouldn’t take cards from Russian banks (so that’s 70% of trading activity which is now unavailable to Russians), and we have seen hard forks in the past because all miners agreed about it, and we have seen BlockFi, Coinbase and others reject “tainted” coins, i.e. coins obtained via illicit activity, and also introduced AML/KYC procedures, so all the “advantages” of wild west banking are slowly eroding, and we are left with the question, why on Earth are we still using a blockchain? Of course we already see several less distributed chains appear, because they are faster and cheaper to run. For example, is the Binance Smart Chain or Solana really decentralized censor resilient chains?

Hedge against money printing.

 

 

[lkn]

15 hours ago, ChrisP24 said:

One of the most interesting quotes to ponder (IMO) from that Gregg Foss video was "when you own bitcoin you have a short position on sovereign debt"

What is the argument for the inverse correlation between sovereign debt and bitcoin prices?

 

How couldn’t such argument not also be applied to cans of beans?

 

Why not open actual short positions in T-bills or similar, if you think the government is about to default on their debt?

 

Honestly, I wouldn’t put much faith in anyone who makes such stupid statements, because alone the fact that bitcoin has gone up over the last 5 years, without the government defaulting, should tell you that it is not a short position on their debt. It is just a speculative asset, and it has started to show a correlation with stock market, even though it was supposed to do the opposite.

[Sparktrader]

48 minutes ago, lkn said:

What is the argument for the inverse correlation between sovereign debt and bitcoin prices?

 

How couldn’t such argument not also be applied to cans of beans?

 

Why not open actual short positions in T-bills or similar, if you think the government is about to default on their debt?

 

Honestly, I wouldn’t put much faith in anyone who makes such stupid statements, because alone the fact that bitcoin has gone up over the last 5 years, without the government defaulting, should tell you that it is not a short position on their debt. It is just a speculative asset, and it has started to show a correlation with stock market, even though it was supposed to do the opposite.

You dont get it. Bonds go down when inflation rises pushing up % rates.

 

Of course u could short bonds but futures r higher risk.

 

Futures can give u 500% or nothing in 1 week.

 

Btc is a great short on bonds without risking 100%

[Sparktrader]

Btc short bonds with less risk more lt upside. Gold does the same but less liquid.

 

Stocks more of an individual thing.

 

 

[ChrisP24]

9 hours ago, Sparktrader said:

Atomic wallet good staking

Thanks, I will check them out.  Not sure I really want to get into staking yet but I do want to figure out how it works, especially with etherium, as the #2 cryptocurrrency by market cap and its much-publicized 2022 merge to proof of stake.   

[dj230]

[steven100]

 

Bitcoin ( XBT )

Bitcoin (XBT)

PRICE
38,897.58
-0.15%

[Sparktrader]

Veteran investor Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with billionaire investor George Soros, says that “what is happening with the U.S. dollar now is the end of the U.S. dollar.” He explained that “an international currency is supposed to be neutral but in Washington, they are now changing the rules,” emphasizing, “Washington does not play fair anymore.”

Jim Rogers on the End of the U.S. Dollar

[Sparktrader]

[Sparktrader]

Up it goes

[Sparktrader]

Rogers has warned that governments could ban cryptocurrencies on several occasions. He said it is the reason he did not invest in bitcoin. However, in May last year, he said he regretted not investing in BTC.

[happydreamer]

Probably why it's flying right now

 

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/09/biden-issues-long-awaited-executive-order-on-crypto/

 

 

 

[Sparktrader]

It moved after Rogers said Usd was no good.

[Whale]

12 hours ago, happydreamer said:

Probably why it's flying right now

Not anymore :+)

[happydreamer]

1 hour ago, Whale said:

Not anymore :+)

It'll bounce off low resistence again but I do believe we're in a range now and any expectation to break out of the range is lofty.  If you're good on selling calls and puts, have at it.  And although I'm pro crypto, personally it's a bit risky for me

[dj230]

23 hours ago, Sparktrader said:

Up it goes

down it goes 

 

23 hours ago, Sparktrader said:

Veteran investor Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with billionaire investor George Soros, says that “what is happening with the U.S. dollar now is the end of the U.S. dollar.” He explained that “an international currency is supposed to be neutral but in Washington, they are now changing the rules,” emphasizing, “Washington does not play fair anymore.”

Jim Rogers on the End of the U.S. Dollar

lol im surprised people fall for this, they say this every year and that the stock market will crash, fund managers don't make money off returns, they make money off their fees.

 

2011: 100% Chance of Crisis, Worse Than 2008: Jim Rogers

2012: Jim Rogers: It’s Going To Get Really “Bad After The Next Election”

2013: Jim Rogers Warns: “You Better Run for the Hills!”

2014: JIM ROGERS – Sell Everything & Run For Your Lives

2015: Jim Rogers: “We’re Overdue” for a Stock Market Crash

2016: $68 TRILLION “BIBLICAL CRASH” Dead Ahead? Jim Rogers Issues a DIRE WARNING

2017: THE BOTTOM LINE: Legendary investor Jim Rogers expects the worst crash in our lifetime

 

[Sparktrader]

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says Bitcoin is “the only one that’s pure-gold mathematics.” He is skeptical of most other cryptocurrencies. In addition, Wozniak is a fan of the metaverse but is less enthusiastic about non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

[Pravda]

I agree. Jim Rogers is a clown.

[dj230]

3 hours ago, Sparktrader said:

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says Bitcoin is “the only one that’s pure-gold mathematics.” He is skeptical of most other cryptocurrencies. In addition, Wozniak is a fan of the metaverse but is less enthusiastic about non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Good ole Wozniak 

 

in 2018 

Quote

Wozniak said he sold most of his remaining bitcoins.

"I didn't want to watch the price every day," he said, adding: "I sold all except one. It was enough to experiment."

 

 

[Sparktrader]

Just now, dj230 said:

Good ole Wozniak 

 

in 2018 

It was 5k back then

[dj230]

2 minutes ago, Sparktrader said:

It was 5k back then

was closer to $10k and he sold all of his back then, shows how bullish he is on it 

[Sparktrader]

Just now, dj230 said:

was closer to $10k and he sold all of his back then, shows how bullish he is on it 

He likes it now

[Sparktrader]

2029 crash imo