Selling Bitcoins in Canada
tbray.org
tbray.org
[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.
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.
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.
It’s insanely fast compared to any other “currency” I’ve transacted with (including BTC, ETH, and LTC).
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?
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.
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.
Cryptos are not liquid at all.
some use localbitcoins to sell hand to hand (never used it).
Haven't tried it personally.
* Before they started adding 50k/users a day and became so backlogged.
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 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.
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
I could have bought stock in Apple the day I saw an iPhone for the first time, and would have made money off it.
Therefore aren't they both gambling? It seems to me that it's just the degree of risk that varies.
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.
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.
Is it 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.
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.
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)
I hope the big bitcoin players are being very diligent about their security practices right now.
At least if you use a US based one, there's some possibility of legal recourse.
Being unable to cash out as easily as cashing in!
They all inevitably shoot themselves in the foot, one way or the other.
If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.