Bitcoin Hits New All-Time High Above $65K on Strength of ETF Debut
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
I've pretty much always thought that it's a bad time to buy and I've always been wrong.
> It’s about time in the market – not timing the market
Best day to buy Bitcoin was yesterday, the second best day to buy Bitcoin is today.
If you bought in April, you only broke even in the past couple of days.
It's very much about timing the market.
I disagree with you there:
a) it's *always* about timing the market, whatever the investment may be: because in the end, you die.
b) on a wide enough moving average window (i.e. if your investment horizon is long term enough), and if you only look at the technical analysis pov (like many are wont to do) and ignore the politics/value conversations, BTCUSD feels like quite a reasonable bet to take.
c) had you DCA'd Bitcoin - say $50 / month - since - say - 2013, you'd be sitting *very* pretty right now.You shouldn't feel bad about it: it just means you're sensible.
I've seen and heard people following that exact line of thought at $2, $30, $300, etc...
Predicting the future is by nature hard.
Predicting the future of a highly volatile phenomenon is psychologically hard.
Volatility on a log scale gets squashed a fair bit.
Not that I disagree with PlanB's model, but that's not what most people look at, especially not daytraders: PlanB's model's investment horizon is way too long for them.
That's not how most people operate though.
Kaplan: Long-term investing works when you keep your money in the market for long periods of time. When you're doing dollar cost averaging, you're not keeping your money in the market over the full period of time. You are keeping much of your money out of the market for much of the time. So, you're not getting the full benefit of long-term investing. Furthermore, when you're dollar cost averaging, you're basically placing a bet. You're placing a bet that the market will be going down shortly after you get the money and that eventually the market will come back up towards the end of the period as you're putting more money into the market.Lots of people have a fear of investing and don't enter the market at all. DCA is a fool-proof strategy which can minimize the fear and is easy to follow for beginners. In the case of Bitcoin, most people simply don't enter at all, because they're too afraid of the short-term movements in the price.
>> created by [deleted] a community for 10 years [Mon Jul 18 06:43:43 2011 UTC]
i laughed and went back to playing counterstrike
i miss 2009
1. Buy Bitcoin at any price, it doesn't matter.
2. Tokenize it into a form that allows you to...
3. Put it into DeFi and collect APY on it.
By collecting interest, it disconnects you from the actual price of bitcoin. As long as you're getting that sweet compounding interest, that is all that matters because it gives you the freedom to choose what you want to do with it.
You can "buy" more bitcoin (ie: don't sell your interest), or you can take that interest and use it to bet on other things.
You're making your "money" work for you which is the best of all worlds. This is a similar play to covered calls, but far easier to reason about.
What is different is that instead of handing your funds off to let some bro at a bank or on wallstreet make the majority of the money, you get to cut out that middle man and take control of YOUR money.
If any of the above is confusing... do some research. Start with google: DeFi.
This will continue to perpetuate itself until the inevitable great stagnation and subsequent crash.
We’re currently in the worlds biggest and longest asset inflation run. Let’s see how it does during a true Great Depression.
If there is a stagnation (the price stands still), then people would start using it (since your point is that people are not using it now because the price goes up), how would that lead to a crash in that case?
Not that I agree with any of your points, your message seems confusing as it stands now.
If you knew the price would never increase or decrease you would cash out to move to more productive uses of your money.
I would disagree.
Holding Bitcoin and not telling a soul will shield your wealth against quite a few "events" (divorce, bankruptcy, seizure, etc...)
Doing the same with cash involves a shovel, a GPS and very long walks in the wilderness.
If the only reason you hold an asset is you think the price will go up, aren't you subscribing to:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
As opposed to holding an asset like AAPL (dividends) or AMZN (earnings growth), where in addition price growth I'm getting a share of future revenues/profits? What future revenues/profits am/will I be getting with BTC? (Or gold for that matter: which is why Buffett isn't into it.)
because you need to eat and live and pay your bills?
because living involves consumption of various resources, other than just coins.
OK ... please explain?
Are you talking about taking loans using your coins as collateral? With the kind of volatility BTC exhibits, that's quite a gutsy proposition.
Any other way to get cash without selling your coins?
There is no place on Earth where you need to spend Bitcoin to live. There is always another option.
If you believe Bitcoin to be better money than Fiat then you won't spend Bitcoin and Gresham's law applies.
People need a store of value that beats inflation. Cash is shedding its value. The return on cash is literally negative between low interest rates and high inflation.
This is basically the definition of a deflationary currency, which Bitcoin has been called by some:
* https://www.skalex.io/deflationary-economics-bitcoin/
Bitcoin though is fairly dividable (see satoshis), so it may not apply as much as to, say, ounces of gold.
> We’re currently in the worlds biggest and longest asset inflation run. Let’s see how it does during a true Great Depression.
The Gold Standard, another deflationary system, helped to make the Great Depression much worse:
* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-an...
If you have access to GBTC instead, it's trading at a discount, and intends to convert to a spot ETF, so it's likely the better option.
A fair question to ask, but there are quite a few places where BTC can be traded against actual cold hard cash and not monopoly money (insofar as you consider USD not monopoly money, a shaky proposition in itself).
So yes, USD, not Tether.
I still see a lot of growth potential, and I believe the current market cap is overstated. Many many coins are permanently lost, my bet is that the true market cap is significantly under $1T.
If BTC held at these levels for the next 20 years, I wouldn't mind. As long as it holds it own against inflation, it's a pretty nice store of wealth.
If it goes another 10x, I won't mind either, obviously. But I really don't need it to: it's got other advantages.
And I couldn't be happier.
Thanks to his nuanced decomposition of the technology I have avoided the wild price swings over the last year, and protected myself against the inevitable crash.
I would recommend anyone with a position in Bitcoin to read his informed analysis on the technology and cash out while you still have chance.
The best time to get out of Bitcoin was a year ago. The second best time is today.
Stephen Diehl is the textbook example of a fanatic. Not just on the topic of cryptos.
I would take whatever he says with a bucketload of salt.
I understand what you're saying and peace of mind is a big part of investing, but you clearly lost out on massive gains.
However, if you want to try timing the market, then perhaps wait until December / early next year when hype is at maximum. The current hype cycle is just starting.
And don't give me the L2 lightning network bullshit. Both you and I know that it doesn't work as an actually decentralized payments system, and it plausible deniability and makeup for a centralized workaround of BTC's fundamental flaws
seems like you've made up your mind so doesn't make sense to engage, but if anybody else comes across this comment - it's pretty much tribalistic bs. lightning network works, it's a system that preserves Bitcoin's security guarantees while decoupling value transfers from onchain settlements. this is how you scale global distributed systems - you localize them into lots of smaller systems that can change state independently in a consistent manner.
The reason this doesnt scale is because for 100 million people to open one payment channel, it will take over a year to process all of those transactions. That wouldn't happen though as the transaction costs would skyrocket to the point people wouldn't bother.
Am I wrong? Genuinely, this is how I see it and why it cannot work.
you absolutely do not. you open a channel once with some node and that channel can be used to send payments to all other nodes.
it's also simplistic view that you need 2 transactions per settlement of a channel because with channel factories you can batch-open-and-close-and-top-off many different channels with single (albeit fairly large) transaction.
systems like that grow organically and people get onboarded via many different methods, so it's not like tomorrow we will have a queue of 100 million people waiting for channels to be opened.
i do expect bitcoin network to hit capacity limit by transactions in future and we will see what it is going to look like, but i rather prefer bitcoin's glacial pace of becoming more and more efficient at ground layer, forcing all sorts of experimentation to happen in upper layers and in sidechains without ever compromising the foundation.
Personally I don't like the glacial pace of ground layer dev, as it makes me think this stuff can't be solved. Each way you approach it is a compromise.
It is infinitely more important to preserve stability of foundation than it is to experiment with new features. Bitcoin runs in its current form for more than a decade and that stability is worth a lot.
What discourages that?
To which the only solution is basically opening a new channel - eg. A new L1 transaction
You either have to centralize the system, or you run into an unsolvable Canadian traveler problem making the thing fairly useless.
Nah, you’re just wrong because good enough solutions are easy to find, nobody cares about 100% optimal.
Try finding the shortest path to a network where you only discover the edges once you reach a node. You only get hilariously suboptimal solutions
Which is why in practice such a system has to be centralized (eg. El Salvador) or it's effectively useless (you resort to opening a new channel rather than passing the money along an unknowable list of channels)
again: LN doesn't need to optimally solve np-hard or worse problems to work, good-enough approximations are easy to find.
But it can't and never will work at large network sizes without being centralized. And no amount of development work will fix that, because it's a core design flaw.
Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time".
It's always in early stages, because it can only achieve early stage levels of usability without devolving into a centralized system. By design.
yeah, if memes are the way you keep yourself informed on the topic then i totally understand your point of view.
the reality is that LN works and what you call "small cliques" are just subnets that route payments internally efficiently but are also able to route externally when the need arises.
this is literally how distributed systems are scaled, internet being the largest one.
it would be centralized if nobody could use LN if some one or two largest nodes failed, but the protocol is open and everybody can open a channel with everybody else and nodes in the middle have no way to censor traffic because they don't know neither the sender nor the receiver.
you're simply misinformed.
Again, either you centralize or you keep having it be a toy
so unless you point out the centers without which LN collapses, your claims are just bogus.
BTC market cap is $1.2t. "t" for trillion, you know.
If the USDT/USD peg began to fail naturally, you'd need a massive amount of non Tether currency to prop it back up (ie buy Tether at peg).
(and mind me, I'm a bitcoin maximalist, but I just don't see how bitcoin's price can be considered real at this point)
> To get a clue, check daily trading volumes and compare them to market caps.
Why does daily trading volume matter? In order to pump BTC twice with the same Tether, they must buy it back from the market right? So the artificial pump is only the total supply, not volume traded.
tether volume *by definition* will be close to BTC volume because BTC and most other altcoins are traded in stablecoins and tether is one of the largest of them. every time BTC changes hands into some other asset - there's a stablecoin on the other side of that transaction. of course trading volumes will be similar, that means literally nothing.
what you're trying to claim is that somebody is actively printing tethers to prop up BTC price, but in that case number of available tethers must grow by amount that correlates with daily trading volume during green days. it doesn't.
between july and now tether cap grew barely by 10% or $6bn while BTC market cap grew by hundreds of billions.
According to your claims, it would reduce the market cap by 10%, right?
i was talking about $6b in tether. if sold on market instantly BTC price would probably not even drop below $50k judging from books i see on different exchanges. there's just no evidence to your claim that all the demand for BTC is created by tether.
also, imo if tether was found not-solvent today, everybody sitting on tethers would run for their lives trying to buy BTC, sending the price to half a million easily.
Now, with Tether. There are a total of ~70B of tethers. You claim that it grew by only 6B, but you kinda forget the previous 64B. Did they enter the market and are sold to people? Or maybe they are still controlled by bitfinex guys, who can use all these money to prop up prices on an exchange controlled by themselves, basically, putting money from one pocket to another, then transferring it back behind scenes? It is more then enough volume to move the price to 1M without putting in a single real USD more into the exchanges.
Also, note that every previous run to ATH has coincided with extremely high blockchain activity, which was a result of a great public interest, with new money entering the market. But now, blockchain is very quiet, mempool falls to zero often. This makes me consider that this run is likely not real. Maybe it is exactly what you say, ATH is the result of tether holders running for their lives trying to buy BTC.
Right, currently USDT trades for USD 1 to 1. I'm not sure what you mean by volume propping up the peg. They would need to be buying massive amounts of USDT spending real USD which sounds..expensive.
Many people thought Web 2.0 was a scam and it would never amount to anything more than an online newspaper. Imagine putting your credit card on the internet, Heavens no!
It’s easy to punch down that what we do not understand.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/stripe-builds-new-crypto-team...
https://cointelegraph.com/news/visa-working-on-blockchain-in...
Not really sure how someone can claim crypto isn't a big thing now.
I think skeptics have moved from "it's not going to be a thing (ie. get acceptance)" to "it's a scam/environmental disaster and government will/should crack down on it".
I don't see evidence of adoption. Most merchants do not accept bitcoin , and if they do few customers use it
Sure, zooming in at specific points in time you can find good/bad numbers, but the only thing that matters is what the current price is, not what it was before.
Eg. Stripe = 1 guy and 4 additional staffers. That's really peanuts for a company with > 4000 employees. They already did it in the past and abandoned it then.
Seems more like FOMO, just because a competitor is also doing it ( eg. Paypal).
As a reminder, there were similar "investments" in 2017 and the only one that remained from then is Square, which has the same CEO as Twitter...
Let me see the % of payments in crypto versus other payments methods and we'll see. I don't think anything changed.
I'll look up if i can find the old article about % of payments in BTC. I'll edit the comment here then, but it's a long time ago.
BitPay, established since 2011, processed one billion in payments and had 23 million of revenue per year. Mostly gift cards...
That's laughable for such a hype.
adoption can look different from what you expect.
When was the last time you made an everyday purchase like food with BTC?
last month. why does it matter? as i said:
> adoption can look different from what you expect.
i don't expect BTC to be used for small everyday payments outside of lightning network or sidechains.
edit:
> Half of those companies you listed are owned by the same guy
this was just off the top of my head, there are many more companies and funds.