"Important note: This narrative applies specifically to exchanging BTC for Canadian dollars, in Canada. Some lessons may apply in other jurisdictions."
The more interesting part of the post is in the 'Why I did it' section. I'd be interested to hear what others have to say on the topic considering I was about to invest some money into cryptos.
Absolutely true, but that's also the case of most stock trading. If you're not buying a stock expecting dividends, but instead hoping to just sell it for more later, that's not much different than speculating on BTC.
Not much! Which is the point. You choose index funds based on lower expense ratio, how spread they are in the market (more spread means lower risk and more likely to just replicate performance of the overall market; less spread means higher risk and less likely to replicate the performance of the overall market), and how much you trust the institution running it.
Holding USD is another form of gambling. Buying a house to live in is gambling.
The thing is that USD can be used to pay taxes in April, a house provides you shelter, a share of APPL entitles you to small fraction of the company... And a bitcoin entitles you to a mathematical number, with nothing backing it.
Bitcoin isn't growing in value because it represents shares of a business that makes real money: it's growing in value because demand is increasing. You can directly connect AAPL's profitability with the value of the phones and computers they produce. Bitcoin does not have such an analogue. The "asset" behind Bitcoin is one part the group of miners who consider to keep the ledger going, one part the ability to facilitate a trade using that shared ledger, and three parts speculation. It's the speculative component that makes it, and all other cryptocurrency, more gambling than investment.
>Bitcoin isn't growing in value because it represents shares of a business that makes real money
Neither is Tesla making real money. Or Amazon.
Yet their stock prices continue to grow from speculation about how valuable they might be one day in the future.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's the same with crypto.
For sure those two companies are "safer" bets than most (or perhaps all) cryptos... but the underlying principle is exactly the same. It's just degree of risk involved.
> Bitcoin isn't growing in value because it represents shares of a business that makes real money.
With bitcoin, you’re investing in whomever the individual is on the other side of your trade. I hope some of these techies become rich enough to take government positions.
Why do the assets behind a company matter? In the event they go bankrupt and have a liquidation event, first their assets will go to loan-providers, then to bond-holders, then to private preferred stock holders, then finally if there are crumbs remaining, to public common stock holders.
isn't the killer app for btc tax evasion and laundering? isn't this how wealthy chinese are getting money out of the country and how russians are routing around sanctions? is the rise in btc therefore perhaps related to paradise papers and banking coming under greater regulation globally? if this is the case, those use cases aren't going anywhere and maybe represent strong fundamentals
That's not even remotely true. Stocks are directly tied to the performance of a company providing goods or services. There's something you can directly gauge.
At BEST you could equate it to currency trading, but even THAT is tied to real-world governments and their policies nine times out of ten. Bitcoin is literally trading on the belief that a bunch of people are going to switch to it instead of the dollar or insert your currency of choice because...?
> That's not even remotely true. Stocks are directly tied to the performance of a company providing goods or services. There's something you can directly gauge.
I'm no stock expert but isn't the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future?
I think the parent made a valid point. Sure, stocks are generally easier to "gauge" (and therefore lower risk) but you're still just speculating that it's future price will be greater than it's current price after all.
> I'm no stock expert but isn't the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future?
That's true, but stock can represent a portion of an asset with production potential. A factory or a mine or a dot-com. Bitcoin is pure fiat money.
If I owned all stock in AAPL, I would own one of the most valuable companies in the world which would yield me several billion USD in profits every year. If I owned all bitcoins my asset would be completely worthless because there would be no market for it.
I defer to Warren Buffett's quote [1] on Gold - an asset similar in it's uselessness:
> Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce -- gold's price as I write this -- its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
> Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-aroundmoney (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
>If I owned all bitcoins my asset would be completely worthless because there would be no market for it.
Of course, but you could say the same about having the entire internet to yourself. Or being the only person on Facebook. That's just a function of how networks work.
> isn’t the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future?
It’s more accurate to say that it’s a reflection of the value to still be generated by the productive capacity that your share represents minus the discount-rate of future money. That’s mostly a multiple of expected earnings (plus the value of capital) which is why earnings calls are so important and heavily regulated. If you buy a stock you’re saying that you think the market has undervalued it, or that it’s fairly valued and you expect it to grow with the economy as a whole.
In a pure gambling scenario like a lottery or roulette wheel all the information you have to go on is contained within the game itself. Increasingly crypto-trading is less about the fundamentals and more about the trading game itself. We’ve watched Ethereum go from one screw up to the next: TheDAO hack and rollback, the first Parity wallet hack, the “I killed it” bug, all ethereum contracts being hobbled for a weekend by a cartoon cat breeding game. Every time there is a big discussion here about the fundamentals of the tech, and how flawed the design is, how there are better approaches or projects. Yet the price is totally disconnected and responds more to being listed on a new exchange than any consideration of the viability or usefulness of the thing itself.
It’s why technical trading, which is close to reading tea leaves when it comes to usefulness on equity markets, actually seems to work in crypto-asset markets. So many people fall back on in the absence or neglect of external information that it that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With stocks, you can more easily separate out the actual performance of the company from speculation (profits vs. stock price), and in the worst case they have assets that provide some intrinsic value. They also operate in a more stable legal environment - it's unlikely that new regulations would instantaneously devalue companies (which could happen with crypocurrencies as they still aren't a settled part of the legal world), and statements made by the company (projected revenues etc.) are regulated.
You can certainly draw parallels between stocks and crypocurrency speculation, but I'd say the differences between the two are fairly fundamental.
That depends how you trade. They might be based on something, but sometimes either THEY are not (look up RIOT as a stock symbol) or those trading don't at all care (day traders).
Look, the reason why stock technical analysis exists is because people sometimes want to make money independently of their perceived value of the underlying asset.
Instead, they try to enter a poker game of mass psychology, some armchair, speculative game theory. Don't kid yourself. While the image of the responsible Warren admiring or index-fund, Boglehead type is a warm one, most of the rest is as speculative and manipulative as Bitcoin.
That is all true in a way, but stocks are still a projection of a projection of a projection ... of future performance of the underlying company. Only bitcoin is turtles all the way down.
I also find it hilarious that people tell that BTC should rise in value because in future some other(!) cryptocoin may/will replace fiat. Because even by their own admissions current BTC state doesn't allow to use it as a working currency. "Hey, Tesla is a future of automotive, lest buy Dacia shares and pump it to the moon".
Intentions don't matter; it's a function of the underlying asset. The worst stock market crash in US history was Black Monday in 1987 which resulted in a 22.6% drop in the DJA. Bitcoin has already experienced much worse crashes than that, multiple times (like the time it dropped 94% in 2011).
I'm not saying don't put money into Bitcoin/cryptos; I'm saying don't put in more than you would feel comfortable losing at a casino.
Intentions do matter though, it's not about the money to some people. Some people understand how revolutionary a decentralized economy would be and want to take part in trying to implement something they believe in. If it's all about making a quick buck then yes, it's gambling. Don't assume money is everything to everyone.
I don't feel comfortable losing any money at a casino, that money goes to an industry that I don't care to support; But I'd be fine losing money in crypto because It's something I want to support.
It doesn't. It pushes the value up and certainly gets more eyes on it but a rising market cap of cryptos doesn't suddenly defeat fiat currencies when a magic threshold is reached.
That "magic" threshold that fiat operates on is a group of people(fed gov) with guns that force it onto people, and will literally imprison you if you don't. Some people consider this oppressive and would like for it to change.
Bitcoin works on a concept called a block-chain; which is essentially a publicly available ledger of transactions. Since this block-chain is distributed around the world, no central party is in control over the wealth represented by the transactions listed on the block-chain. This wealth is further abstracted to arbitrary units we all bitcoins.
Like any artificial representation of wealth(aka currency) it's only as strong as the group of people recognizing it as a representation of value.
So by storing labor or wealth inside bitcoin, you're strengthening the network of participants, thus strengthening bitcoin, thus strengthening(or supporting) decentralized currency.
>The main question is: In one or five or 50 years, will everyone on earth want to use bitcoin, or a lot of people, or a few people, or nobody? There are no fundamentals, no cash flows or price-earnings ratios, to evaluate. It is pure speculation about speculation, a Keynesian beauty contest where all the pictures are blank.
>[...]
>Arguments about bitcoin are like every other shouty argument about financial markets, but with a void at their core. "Bitcoin is capitalism, distilled," says Adam Ludwin, but it isn't quite; bitcoin traders are not allocating capital to productive uses in the real world. Bitcoin is finance, distilled, though, in the narrow sense that the distillation throws away all the messy productive real-world consequences of finance and leaves you with just an abstract thing to trade.
For me the reason to sell at the moment is quite banal: I do not want to spend time thinking about investing over the holidays, and I do not want to feel like I should pick out my phone.
On a side note, I am trying to sell my very little stack of LTC - 7.04 - for like a week or 2. Gdax never works - the ID validation is always down - and I haven't found any other solutions. Any ideas?
I've never trusted the MFA for transfers on GDAX, what I do is transfer to my Coinbase account and then create a bank transfer there where, for some reason, their MFA mysteriously works.
Took me a week before ID check worked (more than timeout, it also forgot my data uploads 3 times.. not reassuring). One day I got a mail saying I was in.
some use localbitcoins to sell hand to hand (never used it).
There is always some sort of spread because arbing has fees, but 10-20% is unheard - had to be a momentary difference. I'm seeing $766 Kraken vs $789 GDAX right now. Both are easy to get USD in/out of* so pretty comparable.
* Before they started adding 50k/users a day and became so backlogged.
Id verification has nothing to do with liquidity. You should get verified before you get into it. GDAX volume for Litecoin/USD was $300M today. If that's not enough you can exchange for BTC and then for USD.
The brilliant thing is, if the author controls the host server of this article and it gets near the top of Google results for its title, watching the article hit-rate [1] should be a neat way of predicting the inevitable bitcoin crash! Probably several hours in advance. He could market out this service for Big Bucks.
[1] After the article stops being front-page-HN'd, at least.
> [1] After the article stops being front-page-HN'd, at least.
He could just check the referrer. This can be spoofed but the majority of people following links, even here, won't do that. Then he can rule out getting posted to other social media and just look at people coming from Google.
Not really, because (as the OP states) there are many places that will sell you BTC but not really allow you to get cash back out, e.g. because of your location.
Is there a consensus regarding trusting these exchanges with scans of verification documents? Bitstamp is asking for scans of a drivers license or passport to verify the account and proceed with transactions.
This is very normal in the financial services industries. I've done it for stock brokers, forex brokers, even money transfer services. Bitstamp is one of the more legit exchanges.
If I was a hacker, bitcoin ecosystem companies would look like mighty tempting targets. Combine the high value of the data (wallets), often inexperienced security teams, lack of security regulation or oversight, and the presence of additional assets sellable on the black market - like a bunch of personal information - and you have a very juicy target for cyber attack.
I hope the big bitcoin players are being very diligent about their security practices right now.
Probably can go either way, and thus depends on the exchange in question. It certainly could be used as a way to gather ID documents for malicious purposes, but a company asking for them is more likely to be trying to follow the relevant regulations (KYC etc.) which would make them more trustworthy.
Bray mentions Ripple as a better crypto to buy because it has an application (ie ledger for enterprise banking and other financial institutions).
I disagree for two reasons:
1. I’ve become convinced that the crypto currencies with applications (ether, xrp, and others) are actually riskier than the simple store of value coins like BTC. If, for example, dapps don’t really take off in popularity and the “application” of the crypto currency fails, I would expect that would tank the value of that currency. BTC or LTC, which seem more like simple store of value coins at this point, would appear to have less of this type of associated risk.
2. Ripple (XRP) in particular seems doomed to me. I do not believe that any major financial institution would use a public blockchain and associated currency. If they need / want to use blockchain, there are non-public options that would better serve banks, some being developed by the hyperledger group and others.
Fair enough, maybe it’s not the best label. My purpose was just to discriminate between the cryptocurrencies that are trying to solve some other problem (create a worldwide supercomputer, decentralized storage, etc) from those that are more straightforward.
I certainly don’t think of any of it as a store-of-value ... more like a trip to the casino!
Bitcoin is new technology, the fact that its use cases are changing is evidence of that. That should be exciting, not disheartening. It would be a worse sign if it simply accomplished the goal it purportedly was intended for and nothing else. This shows it may have more growth potential.
I for one know a few folks who have used bitcoin to transfer large sums of money across borders... pretty crazy times we live in. I expect bitcoin to dominate in this area in the short to medium term.
There seems to be some high profile XRP Customers signed on already, BMO, UBS etc.
I'm not holding my breath as to the wide spread usage in Korea & Japanese banks (as another article states), but I'm optimistic about the technology in general. (1500 TRX/s vs BTC 7 TRX/s)
I guess much of it is just planting a flag, signaling to shareholders and the like that they are not getting left behind. There is a huge difference between "we are in touch with this" and "we are fully committing to this".
It's like the difference between a software consultancy claiming scala expertise because they had a few people read up on it and a software consultancy stopping to write java.
Something like Corda (1) seems like a better technology. Banks get all the benefits of distributed ledger without all the cryptocurrency speculation and hype.
Just a note that Ripple and Mt. Gox founder Jed McCaleb left the Ripple project to form Stellar Lumens which is technologically superior and I expect XLM to surpass XRP in the "cheap transactions and marketable to banks" space.
My question remains though, and here it is in another form: is there a compelling reason for banks to use a public blockchain rather than just use their own private network? I can’t figure out why they would use a cryptocoin-incentivized public blockchain, but maybe I just haven’t thought about it enough. Anyone have a good answer to this?
In the case of Ripple, it’s use case targets remittance and having a publicly trading coin is meant to increase the liquidity of the coin as a settlement layer.
I can't read comments on the Internet for a full hour without bumping into someone trying to advertise the amazing qualities of one or another coin I never heard of. Call me skeptical.
As a side note, just put this together a few days ago myself, Stripe is also invested in Stellar Lumens, having invested $3M USD back in 2014 for 2% of the coins, now Stripe's position is worth over $500M USD.
That counterintuitive (and probably not eternal) relative dependability through lack of a backing asset or functionality is something I have noticed as well. It is easier to explain when comparing bitcoin to the situation when company shares are used as the token in a game of greater fool: there, a business event like a bad quarter (or even a good quarter, tainted by even more optimistic predictions) can be enough to make the music stop. Bitcoin does not have these event sources, but a crypto token with a well defined application or function would. The application would just reintroduce an apparently unnecessary source of bad news.
Bitcoin was initially pitched with an application function as well, paying for services and goods (and, depending on who you asked, sometimes even "anonymous" would somehow sneak into the argument). The "beauty" is that in terms of that metric, bitcoin already has failed, that particular event source has been drained dry. The conversion rate has somehow survived the switch from bootstrapping via proposed use as payment to pure pyramid, but I doubt that this can be replicated.
'You can bet that if (I mean when) Bitcoin deflates, the loss is going to be mostly soaked up by the people who’ve bought in recently, the 95%-plus of holders who collectively own less than 5% of BTC.' ... Can someone help me understand this? How can the 5% buy back 95% of the bitcoin if the 95% tries to cash out? The 95% can't cash out no?
I think what the article is saying is that 5% that own 95% didn't buy in at inflated prices. Those who own just 5% of bitcoins likely bought high, so they will be in the red on a crash. Those with more coinage tend to have bought low and will still be in the black if the market crashes.
E.g. the Winklevoss twins bought 120,000 bitcoins at $10. If the market crashes to $1,010 from today's $16-17,000, they'll still be in the black by $120MM. Sure, on paper they'll have lost a billion dollars, but they're still not hurting.
Not being able to cash out is the entire point of a crash.
Imagine the mathematical edge case of an infinitely fast crash, BTC becoming instantly worthless. In that situation, the 4% who still own almost all of the then-worthless BTC, if they did not fail to play their cards right, will already have almost all the paper money that the 95+% gave them over the course of building their modest "bitcoin fortunes" (though much of that paper money will already be burnt on ASICs and energy). The real crash will be an approximation of that hypothetical instant crash model, with individual outcomes based on quick and correct identification of the crash and (logical and: you need both to succeed) preferred access to the last round of buyers.
I started with CoinBase, not realizing that there wasn't a sell option in Canada. Ive moved to quadrigacx and it's worked well. 0.1BTC transactions are not a problem- I've seen sell orders on scale of 100BTC, so I'm not sure what CoinSquare is about with their limits here. It has several methods to sell/withdraw money to banks, with various fees and wait times.
The big thing for Canadians is on the taxation side. Trade on any digital currency is subject to capital gains- meaning they apply your tax bracket to half your profit.
If you trade digital currency for goods/services (ie. Use BTC as a currency), its considered barter trade. You get taxed on the converted dollar value of the transaction.
It appears Quadrigacx does not do any reporting to the CRA for your transactions, so of course all this would be self-reported at tax time.
Capital gains is an issue for Canadians (and Americans) regardless of what exchange they use. Not reporting sources of income is tax evasion.
It’s amazing to me how frequently discussions of bitcoin profits are mixed with a casual attitude towards committing a major felony. A lot of people made a lot of money this year doing very little work. Be happy you live in a society where this is possible. Pay your taxes.
EDIT: And for everyone worried about a crash in 2018 resulting in a big 2017 tax bill that can’t be paid, a reminder that you can carry losses backwards in Canada for up to 3 years and get those taxes refunded.
IMHO in every country, at least in the first world, your profit from BTC growth would be taxable income, Canada is not special in that regard. The only question is whether it's interpreted as capital gains or something else in your jurisdiction.
American, but I used to FX in Canada using Bitcoin when it actually worked as a currency (like 2013/2014). At the time it was cheaper than dealing with bank rates or merchants that would be lame and only take USD at par.
I'd trade with a few people I met first on the OTC trading channel, then did initial small trades in person. Once enough trust was built up they'd just send me interac e-transfers for my coin. I had a Canadian bank account to receive it.
Nobody would trust randos online to send interac since it could be reversed. But the OTC web of trust worked well back then and I never got burned (unlike with centralized exchanges)
You can use almost any exchange in the world, and then send the fiat in foreign currency into your bank account. Your bank will happily convert to CAD, taking ~3% on a bad conversion rate. Just call your bank prior, make sure they accept USD or EUR or whatever currency you chose.
I’m a little shocked it costs $20 ($10 to send and $10 to receive, and I’m unclear why the receiver seems to cop both fees) to send $2000 from a Canadian bank, to another Canadian bank. That seems absurd. I don’t recall ever being charged for a domestic bank transfer in Australia (I believe the fee is 50c but a free quota is received each month).
Bitcoin options? Can you trade such somewhere?
Using options is the only proper way to short bitcoin right now. But I was not aware of their existence.
115 comments
[ 76.1 ms ] story [ 484 ms ] threadI could have bought stock in Apple the day I saw an iPhone for the first time, and would have made money off it.
The thing is that USD can be used to pay taxes in April, a house provides you shelter, a share of APPL entitles you to small fraction of the company... And a bitcoin entitles you to a mathematical number, with nothing backing it.
Therefore aren't they both gambling? It seems to me that it's just the degree of risk that varies.
Neither is Tesla making real money. Or Amazon.
Yet their stock prices continue to grow from speculation about how valuable they might be one day in the future.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's the same with crypto.
For sure those two companies are "safer" bets than most (or perhaps all) cryptos... but the underlying principle is exactly the same. It's just degree of risk involved.
With bitcoin, you’re investing in whomever the individual is on the other side of your trade. I hope some of these techies become rich enough to take government positions.
Why do the assets behind a company matter? In the event they go bankrupt and have a liquidation event, first their assets will go to loan-providers, then to bond-holders, then to private preferred stock holders, then finally if there are crumbs remaining, to public common stock holders.
Is it gambling?
At BEST you could equate it to currency trading, but even THAT is tied to real-world governments and their policies nine times out of ten. Bitcoin is literally trading on the belief that a bunch of people are going to switch to it instead of the dollar or insert your currency of choice because...?
I'm no stock expert but isn't the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future?
I think the parent made a valid point. Sure, stocks are generally easier to "gauge" (and therefore lower risk) but you're still just speculating that it's future price will be greater than it's current price after all.
Low-risk gambling is still gambling isn't it?
That's true, but stock can represent a portion of an asset with production potential. A factory or a mine or a dot-com. Bitcoin is pure fiat money.
If I owned all stock in AAPL, I would own one of the most valuable companies in the world which would yield me several billion USD in profits every year. If I owned all bitcoins my asset would be completely worthless because there would be no market for it.
I defer to Warren Buffett's quote [1] on Gold - an asset similar in it's uselessness:
> Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce -- gold's price as I write this -- its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
> Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-aroundmoney (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
[1] http://www.nasdaq.com/article/why-warren-buffett-hates-gold-...
Of course, but you could say the same about having the entire internet to yourself. Or being the only person on Facebook. That's just a function of how networks work.
It’s more accurate to say that it’s a reflection of the value to still be generated by the productive capacity that your share represents minus the discount-rate of future money. That’s mostly a multiple of expected earnings (plus the value of capital) which is why earnings calls are so important and heavily regulated. If you buy a stock you’re saying that you think the market has undervalued it, or that it’s fairly valued and you expect it to grow with the economy as a whole.
In a pure gambling scenario like a lottery or roulette wheel all the information you have to go on is contained within the game itself. Increasingly crypto-trading is less about the fundamentals and more about the trading game itself. We’ve watched Ethereum go from one screw up to the next: TheDAO hack and rollback, the first Parity wallet hack, the “I killed it” bug, all ethereum contracts being hobbled for a weekend by a cartoon cat breeding game. Every time there is a big discussion here about the fundamentals of the tech, and how flawed the design is, how there are better approaches or projects. Yet the price is totally disconnected and responds more to being listed on a new exchange than any consideration of the viability or usefulness of the thing itself.
It’s why technical trading, which is close to reading tea leaves when it comes to usefulness on equity markets, actually seems to work in crypto-asset markets. So many people fall back on in the absence or neglect of external information that it that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You can certainly draw parallels between stocks and crypocurrency speculation, but I'd say the differences between the two are fairly fundamental.
Look, the reason why stock technical analysis exists is because people sometimes want to make money independently of their perceived value of the underlying asset.
Instead, they try to enter a poker game of mass psychology, some armchair, speculative game theory. Don't kid yourself. While the image of the responsible Warren admiring or index-fund, Boglehead type is a warm one, most of the rest is as speculative and manipulative as Bitcoin.
This is an empirically false statement
Stocks can be long, rational plays based upon performance, evaluation, analysis of quarterly results and news clippings.
But they can also be greedy speculation.
They are both of these things. Something the 'Bitcoin isn't based on anything asset wise' crowd forgets. Even if they're right in that statement.
I'm not saying don't put money into Bitcoin/cryptos; I'm saying don't put in more than you would feel comfortable losing at a casino.
I don't feel comfortable losing any money at a casino, that money goes to an industry that I don't care to support; But I'd be fine losing money in crypto because It's something I want to support.
How does buying and holding Bitcoin promote a decentralized economy?
Like any artificial representation of wealth(aka currency) it's only as strong as the group of people recognizing it as a representation of value.
So by storing labor or wealth inside bitcoin, you're strengthening the network of participants, thus strengthening bitcoin, thus strengthening(or supporting) decentralized currency.
>The main question is: In one or five or 50 years, will everyone on earth want to use bitcoin, or a lot of people, or a few people, or nobody? There are no fundamentals, no cash flows or price-earnings ratios, to evaluate. It is pure speculation about speculation, a Keynesian beauty contest where all the pictures are blank.
>[...]
>Arguments about bitcoin are like every other shouty argument about financial markets, but with a void at their core. "Bitcoin is capitalism, distilled," says Adam Ludwin, but it isn't quite; bitcoin traders are not allocating capital to productive uses in the real world. Bitcoin is finance, distilled, though, in the narrow sense that the distillation throws away all the messy productive real-world consequences of finance and leaves you with just an abstract thing to trade.
If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cryptos are not liquid at all.
some use localbitcoins to sell hand to hand (never used it).
* Before they started adding 50k/users a day and became so backlogged.
Haven't tried it personally.
[1] After the article stops being front-page-HN'd, at least.
> [1] After the article stops being front-page-HN'd, at least.
He could just check the referrer. This can be spoofed but the majority of people following links, even here, won't do that. Then he can rule out getting posted to other social media and just look at people coming from Google.
hmmm...
At least if you use a US based one, there's some possibility of legal recourse.
I hope the big bitcoin players are being very diligent about their security practices right now.
I disagree for two reasons: 1. I’ve become convinced that the crypto currencies with applications (ether, xrp, and others) are actually riskier than the simple store of value coins like BTC. If, for example, dapps don’t really take off in popularity and the “application” of the crypto currency fails, I would expect that would tank the value of that currency. BTC or LTC, which seem more like simple store of value coins at this point, would appear to have less of this type of associated risk. 2. Ripple (XRP) in particular seems doomed to me. I do not believe that any major financial institution would use a public blockchain and associated currency. If they need / want to use blockchain, there are non-public options that would better serve banks, some being developed by the hyperledger group and others.
I certainly don’t think of any of it as a store-of-value ... more like a trip to the casino!
I for one know a few folks who have used bitcoin to transfer large sums of money across borders... pretty crazy times we live in. I expect bitcoin to dominate in this area in the short to medium term.
I'm not holding my breath as to the wide spread usage in Korea & Japanese banks (as another article states), but I'm optimistic about the technology in general. (1500 TRX/s vs BTC 7 TRX/s)
using it as in, using the technology, or using it as in using the currency?
It's like the difference between a software consultancy claiming scala expertise because they had a few people read up on it and a software consultancy stopping to write java.
(1) https://www.corda.net/
My question remains though, and here it is in another form: is there a compelling reason for banks to use a public blockchain rather than just use their own private network? I can’t figure out why they would use a cryptocoin-incentivized public blockchain, but maybe I just haven’t thought about it enough. Anyone have a good answer to this?
It’s insanely fast compared to any other “currency” I’ve transacted with (including BTC, ETH, and LTC).
Bitcoin was initially pitched with an application function as well, paying for services and goods (and, depending on who you asked, sometimes even "anonymous" would somehow sneak into the argument). The "beauty" is that in terms of that metric, bitcoin already has failed, that particular event source has been drained dry. The conversion rate has somehow survived the switch from bootstrapping via proposed use as payment to pure pyramid, but I doubt that this can be replicated.
E.g. the Winklevoss twins bought 120,000 bitcoins at $10. If the market crashes to $1,010 from today's $16-17,000, they'll still be in the black by $120MM. Sure, on paper they'll have lost a billion dollars, but they're still not hurting.
Imagine the mathematical edge case of an infinitely fast crash, BTC becoming instantly worthless. In that situation, the 4% who still own almost all of the then-worthless BTC, if they did not fail to play their cards right, will already have almost all the paper money that the 95+% gave them over the course of building their modest "bitcoin fortunes" (though much of that paper money will already be burnt on ASICs and energy). The real crash will be an approximation of that hypothetical instant crash model, with individual outcomes based on quick and correct identification of the crash and (logical and: you need both to succeed) preferred access to the last round of buyers.
The big thing for Canadians is on the taxation side. Trade on any digital currency is subject to capital gains- meaning they apply your tax bracket to half your profit.
If you trade digital currency for goods/services (ie. Use BTC as a currency), its considered barter trade. You get taxed on the converted dollar value of the transaction.
It appears Quadrigacx does not do any reporting to the CRA for your transactions, so of course all this would be self-reported at tax time.
It’s amazing to me how frequently discussions of bitcoin profits are mixed with a casual attitude towards committing a major felony. A lot of people made a lot of money this year doing very little work. Be happy you live in a society where this is possible. Pay your taxes.
EDIT: And for everyone worried about a crash in 2018 resulting in a big 2017 tax bill that can’t be paid, a reminder that you can carry losses backwards in Canada for up to 3 years and get those taxes refunded.
Their interface could use an overhaul but that's neither here nor there.
I'd trade with a few people I met first on the OTC trading channel, then did initial small trades in person. Once enough trust was built up they'd just send me interac e-transfers for my coin. I had a Canadian bank account to receive it.
Nobody would trust randos online to send interac since it could be reversed. But the OTC web of trust worked well back then and I never got burned (unlike with centralized exchanges)
Being unable to cash out as easily as cashing in!
They all inevitably shoot themselves in the foot, one way or the other.