Bitcoin ‘More Than Just a Fad,’ Morgan Stanley CEO Says

Occasionally people are listened to because they have something to offer, like, say, running one of the world’s largest investment banks. His remarks immediately made Bloomberg, CNBC, and so on, which is just free PR. From the head of Morgan Stanley. Who in the current world, and not the glorious future one you want, commands respect and attention. Talk about biting the hand throwing your passion a bone.

And what’s your plan to make Gorman and other investment banks irrelevant with cryptocurrency? You’re talking about something like, what? A third of the world economy? I made that number up, but it’s probably even more. Nobody will have financial planning services and investments in your cryptographic future? End capitalism? How should I explain what you want to the soybean farmer next door who needs an ag loan from one of those very banks to buffer crop loss from an imported Asian pest? The free market will figure it out, and the entire system of capital allocation we all know is fundamentally broken and useless? If only he mined Litecoin?

The single biggest thing holding crypto back is tone deaf arrogance like this from its biggest proponents. Slow down, buddy, you’ve successfully monetized files of bits. Completely disrupting the entire world economy and making banks irrelevant is a wee bit far fetched and even if it isn’t, should be approached with a little more caution than a lot of crypto folks give it. You’re talking about the (imperfect) global system that feeds billions of people and keeps them alive. Show it some respect; only hundreds of thousands of people, nigh, millions, worked on it before the engineers with vim showed up and declared they know better.

Cryptocurrency is good. Let’s be reasonable when discussing it.

Someone gave me one of his books, the first part of the first chapter explains that "Mad Money" is money you can put aside after buying things like disability insurance and making sensible retirement investments (and having an emergency fund, and so on).

In coinbase you can make a purchase instantly and lock in at a specific price that instant (even if the transfer takes a week to really go through).

In my one case, I bought some at $2700, it took a week to post and actually give me my Bitcoin, but I got it at $2700 even when the price was at $3000 by then (the gains far outweighing the fee of a few percent). But in GDAX I need to fund my USD account which took a week before I can buy.

Yes the fees are less, but if you are looking for simple, spending $5-10 in fees won't hurt for a much easier and more straightforward experience. But GDAX is also fantastic if you are comfortable with it.

I'm really curious to hear what's the rationale behind your post. Please elaborate.

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/topics/79436...

Options and derivatives are risky. A merely volatile asset that never expires is pretty conservative in comparison.

Many other coins have gone up 2x, 5x, even 10x in the last weeks/months.

Bitcoin going from 4K to 20K in 4 years (ie 5x) is relatively tame.

You just have to do a calculation involving the number of people on the planet to figure out when the supply of new suckers runs dry and the price crashes.

I'm bullish on crypto but McAfee is... well something else.

LN, for example, is adding degrees of centralization to achieve better scaling. Human systems have a tendency towards centralization and consolidation of power/authority as well, as we see in various ways already with Bitcoin (China, Ver, Core).

There's overwhelming evidence to believe that the future of Bitcoin is much more centralized, at which point it starts to resemble the systems we already have but with horrifying disadvantages: your entire transaction history is public to everyone, your identity can be linked to your wallet through exchanges, etc.

Another example is that the electricity cost to run the system is going up at an unsustainable pace. Eventually they'll have to switch to an new way to propagate the blockchain something other than Proof of Work mining.

Most likely though, these problems will be solved with some kind of hard fork rather than BTC dying.

Real investments have a return derived from capital. A house, for example, can be rented out for money. Or a business can earn profit and distribute it to its shareholders. You can try to buy and sell houses like people did during the RE bubble for profit, or try to buy and sell stocks like a day trader, but these are still fundamentally different from an "asset" which has no means by which to generate a return on its own.