'Irresponsible' London Underground Bitcoin Advert Banned
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
[0] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/82814/secretly-smart-rea...
People are like Google search. "foo" and "not foo" both trigger an association with "foo".
I found it laughable when I first saw it months back, on the side of a bus. Like, "What?! It's the absolute worst time to buy!".
For Bitcoin this is about it gaining mainstream recognition, in a way it still is not recognized, since some countries want to ban it, in others it is unregulated and so on.
But for 1929 is about when even people that normally wouldn't be investing, think they are good investors because they are investing and getting impressive returns, it means the stock market is overheated, and more sensible investments are not giving enough returns.
That said we are in a 1929 situation right now, in my opinion, not only stocks keep rising, but seeing even meme cryptos skyrocketing, a rise in employment in cassinos bigger than employment in production (according to jobs data in US), and seeing people that can't pay their own expenses properly "investing", makes me think something is seriously wrong with the economy, not just in US mind you, I am seeing in other countries a rapid proliferation of investment advice online courses and coaches, rapid gains in questionable investments, a rise in popularity of scams and pyramid schemes, basically people want to save, can't figure out how to save, and are burning money in the cheapest options (meanwhile a good choice would be buy land for example, but despite me being in the top 5% richest in my country, I can't afford any, at all! I live in a "projects" style rented apartment and despite me wanting to actually farm, all my income is going in paying the ever increasing food, medicine and rent costs! I can't afford buying property, much less electronics, toys, etc... that would move the economy beyond the bare mininum).
This really is about "people that normally wouldn't be investing, think they are good investors because they are investing and getting impressive returns".
In short, the root cause behind everything you're talking about is low interest rates and money supply inflation. Rich people have been on an asset buying spree (primarily real estate but not only) by borrowing at close to 0 interest, which makes ownership of those assets more and more out of reach from everyone else as they bid each other up.
'Coincidentally', the world happened to be in lockdown during the bulk of this money printing, limiting inflation in consumption goods and making this transfer of wealth stay outside the zeitgeist.
The gambling craze among the lower classes is the tail-end of that.
Really though the only numbers that matter are when you buy and when you sell. Some people got rich buying at 30$ and selling recently, others lost money buying at those same prices but selling at the wrong time.
Only 3 certainties in life: death, taxes, and your crypto exchange experiencing lengthy outages when people try to cash out.
You gotta respect the gusto.
“There's a 'hot' subculture in our society that says 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying', that refers to lies as 'hustle', that rewards and embraces deception as just agressiveness and boldness, as a norm for life and business and even a celebration of human nature - as if the worst elements of human nature define us any more than the best, as if we don't have that choice (at least, that's how I am trying to articulate it).”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5273325-j-p-morgan-tells-th...
Huge reach!
Bitcoin needs a growing supply of suckers. At some point, the sucker supply runs out.
Not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority
which, if you're not particularly financially-literate, can seem very similar to the small print found on every other financial product:
Regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority
Which begs the question, when is the time to sell? When you stop seeing it on the Underground (now?).
It's much more than that now, and in inspiring Etherium and all the other new paradigms, it's totally changed alot of people's thinking.
From the Bitcoin whitepaper, page 1 paragraph 1 sentence 1
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution
What universe do you people live in?
After having been stripped of most of the functionality that gave BTC it's original value proposition, you might be surprised at the degree to which it really does need ads like this to attract fresh investors.
BTC killed it's most powerful tool for cementing it's position as the leading cryptocurrency, it's network effect.
They killed it by merging "full replace by fee", making it trivial to cheat bitcoin-accepting merchants during times of higher network congestion. This made it even super risky for merchants and many opted out. They even had a much safer alternative (FSS-RBF) ready to merge.
* https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6352
* https://blog.plan99.net/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d
They killed it by using the size of OP_RETURN to gaslight Counterparty, a company that was trying to build a rich smart contract ecosystem (yeah like Ethereum has now) on top of bitcoin. This was the second time the core devs' hatred of smart contracts killed new use cases for the coin. The first time led Vitalik to create Ethereum.
*https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi...
They killed it by blanket censoring on all the big bitcoin related communication channels all discussion about increasing the blocksize and/or building/supporting alternative BTC full nodes. This censorship completely fractured the community and directly led to the network fork called Bitcoin Cash. As a result of this fork, many of the oldest supporters and infrastructure devs left BTC forever.
* https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...
A legal corporation selling Bitcoin isn't outside the system.
This is why people cannot simply put part of their earnings into a simple savings account anymore — traditionally a low-risk way to accrue interests and leaving the risky investment schemes to more knowledgeable people. In these times everybody thinks to be a good investor ...
People calling for banning Bitcoin should rather consider where this trend is ultimately coming from and start questioning our current monetary system instead.
Personally, I am quite positive towards certain cryptos but I think these crazy pumps and dumps we see currently are not only fueled by technological craze but especially by bad monetary policies implemented by irresponsible governments addicted to deficit spending on the one hand and central banks supporting the abuse. In the long run Bitcoin and DeFi blockchains might actually help bringing back reason and humility into the financial sector but currently they are driven by a huge surplus of money created by the very people in power now demonizing cryptos.
I believe the correct term is "fools gold".
> Advertising must be clear that the value of investments, unless guaranteed, could go down as well as up, ASA rules stipulate.
I have had several of their trusts in my portfolio for decades now.
> The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the advert was misleading and left out important risk warnings.
> Luno said the ads would not appear again and that future ads would feature an appropriate risk warning.
> Advertising must be clear that the value of investments, unless guaranteed, could go down as well as up, ASA rules stipulate.
It sounds like if the AAPL or gold had advertising that flagrantly violated the rules, they would also be banned.
Well, no, you can't use Bitcoin for integrated circuitry. Since it's literally bits, it's not useful as jewellery either. So let's put that aside. There isn't even a point discussing it. Gold wins here, hands down. Some people do think the addresses, both in b64 and QR form are quite aesthetic tho...
What we are really discussing is the ease and cost of transacting these assets. Ask any South African armed transport guard, and he'll tell you that he'd only transport gold in a heavily armoured truck, with heavy weapons and backup. Despite that, a lot of trucks, with far less value than gold in it, get violently hijacked every year. Sometimes even with RPG's! I can't imagine the cost of all that, but let's just agree that it's extremely expensive. So I think you can safely say that gold is both harder and more expensive to mine, transact and to look after than Bitcoin. Meanwhile all you need to keep your Bitcoin safe is a private key.
Bitcoin has at least 4 highly valuable use cases.
1. It's regulation resistant. When two parties voluntarily agree to exchange Bitcoin for a trade, nobody can step in between.
2. It's crime resistant. It's almost useless for extortions due to how flagged addresses and accounts can be tracked and shut down by users and exchanges.
3. It's easy and painless to transact across borders and regulated regions.
4. It's a store of value, due to how it's an absolutely finite resource.
It beats gold hands down in all these categories. On top of that it's far more environmentally friendly than gold. But no, you can't fill your teeth with it.
- If a workaround is found to its cryptographic formula, it goes to zero immediately,
- If quantum computing is invented,
- If a government tightens the tax declarations about it, making it a pain for a lot of holders who would then look into liquidating en masse,
- If EY wanted to squash ransomware (as France does, being #1 victim) and requires “source of wealth proof” for every BTC transaction,
- If a country like US or China assimilates BTC to terrorism or evasion, since Iran has been found using it to circumvent petrol restrictions, since Chinese people use it to evade the country, any country could decide for any reason that BTC is illegal and provoke a mass sale.
This company has agreed to do the same going forward. Otherwise they could have just kept the ad up and let the regulator take them to court.
One thing you can guarantee is that the value of GBP could only go down with these fools in power. Maybe we should have some rules stipulating that must be clear during political campaigning.
Value of GBP compared to what? £1 = £1
Did.... did you just implicitly compare the Pound to Dogecoin?
Here in Canada it's considered a disaster if the dollar rises too much too quickly. We're an export-oriented economy and a rising dollar depresses the manufacturing and extraction industries every time it happens.
You say GBP going down like it's an inherently bad thing and I can't figure why. If either CAD or the GBP started consistently appreciating over time, both countries would be in quite a lot of trouble. In fact the monetary policy and debt issuance policies assume slight depreciation.
I primarily attribute the growing "wealth gap"---the growth in the net wealth owned by the top 0.1% of people, from a 5% share in 1970 to a 20% share in 2020---to the end of Bretton-Woods and the gold standard (1971).