1) Don't.
Longer version:
1) Don't be the last sucker.
Longer version:
1) Don't be the last sucker.
Thanks in advance.
But, it's worth knowing about possible biases everyone can posses. In this case, patio11 works for Stripe which is in a very strong position in the traditional currencies world ,which used to have Bitcoin support but ended it in 2018. So there might be some bias against Bitcoin there, but maybe not.
Again, not saying they are wrong in the article linked, just to keep possible biases in mind when reading it.
Same goes for reading pro-Bitcoin articles where the authors might be holding Bitcoin themselves. Useful to keep in mind.
Edit: Just to showcase what I mean, the linked article basically starts off with "The dominant use case for cryptocurrency is speculation" which shows that there is indeed plenty of biases scattered around the article. Not to say it's all false, but there is biases present.
I don't have any horses in this race (anymore), and I don't really have a strong opinion on whether I think he's likely right or wrong... I just find his writing on the topic amusing.
Any native English speakers who can translate this idiom? I always thought of this idiom as the "last bagholder" in ponzi schemes, rigged pump+dump stocks and alike, but would be weird to apply that to Bitcoin here so not sure if I understand it correctly.
People who say things like this assume that Bitcoin is going to $0 at some point.
That is the correct understanding.
Because Bitcoin has no inherent value, the only way to profit from it is to sell it to someone else. But if you're the "last sucker", then you are going to sell it to? If there's no one next, you have a bunch of bits that aren't useful for anything.
Bitcoin has (so far?) 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.
So if you purchase it, what exactly are you expecting to achieve by that ownership, except to sell it to someone else in the future?
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.
1. Selling
2. Not buying
Jokes aside. Simply treat it as highly leveraged investment. It makes sense to have those in your portfolio if you know what you are doing.