Dogecoin trading volume hits $5B, surpassing Bitcoin's for the first time ever
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
From an economist perspective, price fluctuations on money is not a feature it is a very serious bug. There is a whole lot of economic theory worried on preventing it. "Good" money should avoid being the target of speculation, it should be stable, boring, predictable. Money that changes their prices is like an unit of measure (meters, quilos) that stretches and shrinks unexpectedly.
There was a long time ago when I could use bitcoins to buy web templates. Today almost no one accepts it as payment. Exactly because it is unstable.
If we judged the stability of a currency by its supply stability, then Bitcoin would be the most stable currency ever to exist. But for now, it must compete with sovereign fiat currencies and everything is priced in those currencies, so it will appear extremely unstable and perhaps unusable for most transactions.
Or because transactions became too expensive.
But as I've been getting more and more into crypto, especially DeFi, it's clear to me that we are on the cusp of something incredibly revolutionary. Right now, DeFi is to finance what the world wide web was to communication and content in 1993
The internet managed to break every established industry that relied on network effects and scale - media, commerce, communication. But it didn't do much for finance. The world's biggest banks are still the same as they used to be 30 years ago (whereas internet based companies have taken over media and commerce).
DeFi is going to change that. If you rummage through the scams (and there are a LOT of them), there are some truly exciting ideas being explored in this space. It legitimately feels like the internet in 1994. Heck, even the web design is wild and adventurous as it used to be instead of the boring, tame "professional startup" crap we see everywhere now.
It has failed as a payment system, as a currency, as a reserve currency, a remittance channel, a timestamping service, a settlement layer, a bank for the "unbanked", a cypherpunk liberator, a money laundering tool, a drugs-by-mail tool, a unit of accounting, a store of value, and as a "disruptive" fintech technology.
When I think of crypto/Bitcoin, I am reminded of Warren Buffett's view on gold:
> 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-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
[…]
> A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
* https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf
Perhaps it's just the current implementations of 'crypto' that are lacking, and a Crypto 4.0 will get the details right at some point in the future so that it because useful.
The most interesting use case of crypto to me is synthetic assets. That's where the majority of money in the trading world is stored and made.
Think of margin trading, and buying insurance on being margin called, and trading those insurance tokens - all of these are not "real" assets. They're synthetic; they've used a real asset (say, a stock), multiplied that manifold and enabled trade on it, unlocking exponentially higher value to be created.
Trouble is that this entire world is completely closed to you and I. Goldman Sachs can trade it, but you can't. You can't drop into a bank and ask to underwrite the insurance on my trading account being liquidated - only the bank can.
DeFi changes that. Any asset on-chain can be theoretically combined and made tradable. You can get a loan on DeFi platforms like AAVE. Another platform can offer insurance on those loans. And another platform can offer people the chance to bet on the insurance being called. Since everything is on-chain, a single asset can create exponential value. And since it's all decentralized, anyone can participate, not just banks.
DeFi is honestly in its infancy. The biggest platforms are barely a few years old. The idea of synthetic assets has just taken root. New platforms are just starting to explore opportunities for synthetic assets. There are some very interesting new ideas about stable currencies (look at Ampleforth, Basis Cash, Dynamic Set Dollar). There are new insurance platforms coming up where you can add money into an insurance pool and take a cut out of insurance payments.
If it works - and I truly hope it does - I can't imagine anything more exciting. The internet hasn't managed to break down the walls of traditional finance, let alone investment banks and insurance companies. DeFi is the chance to do that.
Explore this space. I used to dismiss it as just memes and scams. But the more I've dug in, the more I've realized how important it is to make money - and the opportunities to make money - free from banks.
Fifty years ago you hand to walk into a physical office and buy shares in block of 20/50/100 or lots of a $500 multiple: no longer the case. Thirty years ago most people, could barely have diversification, and index funds were barely known: no longer the case. Nowadays you have to have at least a seven-digit account if you want to be able to do direct indexing: how long before that's won't be the case?
Many things were only available to the large players because they were only practical/economical at a certain scale. Technology has improved efficiencies to the point that many product offerings are now available 'down market' to where they used to be.
> Explore this space. I used to dismiss it as just memes and scams.
I never (quite) believed that it was "just memes and scams", but rather solutions trying to solving so-called problems where (a) the problems were imagined, or (b) the creators of the solutions didn't understand things well enough to make useful solutions. (Deflationary currencies? Really?)
Still not sure who is spending money on the joke, but think it’s cool to see internet world/real world crossovers.
I know that if I seriously propose that offer someone will take it, but you know, I'm talking about something perennial
Such as
Edit* Sorry, on my phone and my eyes are not that great, I miss read communities and vps.
Same goes for buying significant Apple or Amazon stock in the late 90s and holding until now.
Nah, it doesn't eat at me, only when a story like the one in this thread comes up. :/
The reality is that I was 25 at the time and knew absolutely nothing about the financial industry. I still know next to absolutely nothing, but I was serious about being happy to have learned some things due to playing with BTC. I consider it a fairly inexpensive lesson in how it all works... I'm no good at trading, but to this day I can follow stories about the markets a little better than I would have otherwise. I also learned that trading was fun! It almost gave me an appetite to get more into it, but I realized that at the end of the day I prefer spending my time making functional things than pushing money around.
The other thing that got me to stop was after trying to get into algorithmic trading, which I just couldn't get to work for me, I finally did a basic correlation analysis on prices and realized there is far more noise than signal into those indicators. Obviously there are ways to predict and profit, but I realized it was far too subtle an art for me, and I moved on to other interests.
For you. But I know quite a few mid 30s retirees.
I agree that a lot of people seem to have a problem with impulse control and trusting their own valuation, when everybody say "it's wrong - it's a fad - it's tulip/beanies".
Eventually you tune out everyone and learn to laugh all the way to the bank at the HN nonsense.
BTW I wouldn't dismiss DOGE as a fad if I were you. Same mistake again and again on HN: regular people doing something? They must be wrong!
Turns out regular people want a crypto they don't feel bad about, and that's not owned by big banks like BTC/ETH or anarchists like XMR/ZEC. There aren't many that can deliver, and DOGE is one of them.
Do you have a position, or are you planning to fail again?
Because the WSB mob is out for blood, and if GME is any sign, they are foaming at the mouth. DOGE should have been a simple pump, but it's still around 900 sats
I give it 3 days (time for the deposits to clear and for people to coordinate) until it starts again.
Redditors have stated their goal: parity to the USD. They are half way though.
> There aren’t many Bitcoin millionaires through speculation or early mining alone.
The best way not to win is not to play, alleging it's psychologically and economically impossible.
EDIT: for the reply with a quote of DOGE in cents: They just did a 10x event. All they need is another 10x event to get DOGE on par with USDT.
They have already done one with minimal coordination and media attention, so I call that half way through because they already did half the work. It was done in a few days, thus a log scale seems applicable.
Of course, if you care about the linear value in fiat currencies, we have different values, so you may prefer a different choice of words.
Uhh what? It didn't even reach 0.1 USD.
But I also know that even if I'd made double that, I'd never have had the nerve to hold for a decade. The only way I would have made any serious money would be by forgetting about them.
On the other hand, if everybody had held from the beginning, would this have happened?
:(
+1 on the lessons learned, now I just need to loosen up and accept a tad more risk in my life.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough, and in retrospect I should have bought $100 of it to hold, but I don't regret not just HODLing back then. The times were different.
oh well, at least those steam games were played.
More broadly, this is now a world in which everyone is short sanity and long craziness, until the "correction" arrives. Meanwhile I need to figure out how to cash out the "litecoin" I was given for free by Keybase.io .. what's the reliable exchange for this?
The community of genrosity and general kindspiritedness that formed around the silly currency really is a highlight of the time I've spent bouncing around internet communities. Its only fitting it pop up now I think.
This is a first for Dogecoin, and it happened as the price of DOGE surged around eightfold overnight from $0.012 to over $0.08."
Very blockchain
Good boi
Curse you Elon!! :D