$8000 of SHIB coin is worth $5.7b (in 400 days)
financemagnates.com
financemagnates.com
- This would only be the "greatest trade ever" if they actually cash out, i.e. realise the paper profits. The other two examples of "greatest trades ever" did realise their profits. There are of course questions as to whether they could in this case.
- Assuming they could cash out and make $5bn, and if they did, who would the losers be? In the case of the George Soros trade, he made his billion at the expense of the British tax payers, who collectively had to pay an extra £3.3 billion taxes, and mortgage payers, who saw their interest rates shoot up to 15%. In this case, presumably it would be all the people who bought SHIB for a higher price than that at which it settles after cashing out, plus everyone else on the planet who suffers from the social, political and environmental fallout from cryptocurrencies. That $5bn would have to come from somewhere.
Your losers scenario requires that SHIB declines materially after the buyers pick up the $5b of the crypto (such that the buyers inevitably end up losing money). You've built that assumption in and it's incorrect to automatically assume that, it's a central flaw in your premise.
There are not losers in every economic transaction in fact. The buyers may end up losing money.
Yes it is.
People playing mind games does not anchor reality to them
Darknet markets are also facilitated, creating very valuable marketplaces. You wouldnt say ebay has no value
Anyone holding USD.
Tesla sold something like $100M to test the liquidity of Bitcoin. Nobody tested to sell $5B of a cryptocurrency, let a lone a meme coin.
Next month, $8B of Bitcoin that have been locked in Mt. Gox are expected to be released to their owners. That could become the biggest liquidity test in the history of crypto.
I don't read too much into that in terms of how much a large trade would move the market, but it's something.
Well, this is a textbook FOMOing.
And a textbook scamcoin. They shilled it hard before a FOMO chain reaction began. Good job. Good profits.
They sold because it was the best way to have a book profit for the quarter
Anyway they always said it was to "prove" it's liquid and just as good as holding cash, not to "test" it.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/musk-says-tesla-sold-bitcoin-to-...
If this account belongs to someone with already deeper pockets (say someone who put 8 grand in a bunch of coins), wouldn't they have already learned that taking money off the table is a good idea when you slug it out of the solar system? Let alone with a dog coin.
Next month, Mt. Gox is only expected to officially ratify approval of a plan to distribute the remaining $8B USD in bitcoin. Although nobody knows when the distribution will actually take place (6/12/18/24+ months), based on the timing of steps outlined in the approved plan, the distribution is definitely not happening next month.
With my dismal math skills I won't be making any profitable trades though.
At the very least you could create a commemorative diamond hands NFT collection and walk away with a few million.
A Japan dotcom bubble billionaire, Yasumitsu Shigeta, went from $42 billion at the peak in 2000, down to $600m by 2009 as his shares of Hikari Tsushin (mobile phone distributor) sank. Still extraordinarily rich, however that's a remarkable $41 billion decline. He went from being worth $1b to $25b in one year in 1999.
Masayoshi Son rode Softbank down by something around $75b after the dotcom bubble. Softbank lost 98% of its stock market value.
There were obviously a lot of billionaire wipeouts during the US dotcom bubble as well, as people held and sank, although none quite as dramatic as those two declines.
But I really like those examples. Decreases the survivorship bias you have when this term is usually referred to.
go back to reddit
It just tells you that the nature of the beast does not change. We make fun of crypto but the same kind of shilling goes on in the supposedly more sophisticated investor circles as well.
It's not a "bait-and-switch", per se, it's just an information asymmetry -- that speed will be achievable on speedtest.com alone, that transfer speed looks great just as long as you haven't put more than 128gb (or whatever it is) onto the drive, if you cover the SOC in copper heatsinks (sold seperately) you can get some performance back, and the motherboard can be replaced but that rig'll play LoL just fine. If you know these things, then the game is navigable; the statements about speed or capacity or value are "true", there's "just" important and missing information about what happens once t>0 or the feeding frenzy starts or capacity is exceeded or whatever.
Most actual professionals laugh at this kind of valuation, which is what makes the whole affair funny since a large portion of the industry is nevertheless happily using it.
I suppose one doesn't have to go too far for the reason: it benefits a large portion of the industry to value things this way, because they are implicitly inflating the value of their own investments.
Honestly, if I were to interview a quant and they claimed with a straight face that this is a sensible thing to do, I'd immediately thank them for their time and bid them farewell. It's that ridiculous.
Finally, I don't consider internal systems at banks to be some sort of benchmark for valuation. Most systems at banks are utter garbage. There are a few exceptions (option/exotics desks), but the rest is basically ran out of excel sheets.
Similarly, the upvote chart for this entry may look like it was shared on some place hours after being posted, and upvoted in bulk: https://upvotetracker.com/post/hn/29024311
[edit: removed "insinuating" bit, against HN guidelines]
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Sometimes posts that had few votes get put on the best list and given a second chance. Looks to me like that’s how this story started getting more votes, allowing it to gain traction.
See also this post by HN moderator “dang” about the second chance system and the comments he wrote there as well about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
> Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community.
Anyway, don't want to put the tin-foil hat. I removed the incriminating bit.
Thanks, your original comment is better now after that edit I think.
Step 2. Create a coin, buy a lot of it for yourself
Step 3. Get friend to list your coin on Coinbase
Step 4. ???
Step 5. Profit
Greater Fool Theory underpins crypto currencies. NFTs are a variation on them designed to evade securities regulation. With crypto pogs you're either the con man or the mark.
There is no theory, each one is different. Some propose different ways to do transactions, or different scaling solutions, different governance, different ways to do smart contracts etc. Some are poor solutions, others are outright scams.
BTC and ETH aren't special, they're just big. BTC has the market place it has because it was first, not because it's better in any technical way. Similarly with ETH - it has a large community but it isn't necessarily better at smart contracts (or it might be - people will argue about this indefinitely).
The original promise of crypto was verifiable, trust-less, decentralized transactions of value without middlemen, sanctions or high fees.
These transactions have different properties, whether alt-coins, BTC or Ether; for example:
* Transaction speed can be Fast / Slow
* Security - Very Secure / Broken
* Centralization - Tends towards decentralization / Centralization
* Transaction cost - Fee-less / Extreme
* Privacy / Transparent - Opaque
* Energy Efficiency - Highly Efficient / Purposefully wasteful
Some alt-coins have far, far surpassed BTC and Ether in all of the above. However, the people who hold BTC and Ether were there first, made the most, and have no intention of letting that value go.
If cryptos are nation state currencies, BTC and Ether have invested their money in defense and propaganda. Alt coins are a mixed lot, but some of them have greener, faster, more sustainable and less centralized methods. The small citizenry is what holds them back despite technological superiority; for now.
The funny thing about that analogy though, is that changing your backed nation state takes less than a second...
Yes in the short term. Picking the best tech is disincentivized, because there are many and powerful forces beyond technical characteristics at play.
No in the long term, because technology really does matter once people actually try to use the coin. Ether was once the best tech, and it was $10 a coin. Now it isn't, and it's >$4k.
For example: More and more of the people who make money using their graphic cards to mine Ethereum are choosing to have their payment transferred in Nano, and other alts. It just makes more sense to go with the fee-less and near-instant option, when there's a choice like that to be made.
It's not always the company with the best technology that wins. There are lots of different factors that influence that.
That's not to say there aren't greener alternatives out there (especially with Proof of Stake networks), but some of these coins claiming to be greener are only that way because they're not used anywhere near as much.
These are speculative 'assets' that can only be traded for another speculative asset (altcoin) or a 'stablecoin' that promises that each coin is backed with US$1, but refuses to conduct an audit to verify it.
Let's make a HN coin! Who is in?
We're simply waiting on low-information speculators to figure things out at their pace and eventually declare the rightful heirs to the BTC "king of crypyocurrencies" throne, so even places like HN might feel comfortable integrating natively, instead of looking foolish later for adopting a "dumb method that takes an absurd amount of time/fees/etc" (BTC).
Let’s just create a new token on the ethereum network and use the power of the hn community to drive up the price.
At some point the music stops
Otherwise WeWork would be a $50bn behemoth as its backers continued to insist right up until the comical S-1 dropped.