swensel

Someone in Venezuela could put their money in Bitcoin to prevent against currency debasement of their native currency. They also could get their money out of the country using it.

What other investments would you consider? To me, if there are bubbles going on, the stock market is in one as well, as is real estate, etc. I've looked at the other investments available, and they also either seem very inflated, with room to fall, or stagnant and not able to keep up with inflation.

I'd prefer to hold cash in a savings account, but the rates are so low now it just doesn't make sense to hold a lot in cash. I don't feel that safe in the stock market either.

I'm a Bitcoin fan and I actually do agree, some of the narratives conflict. From my perspective it is a new asset class and the world is still figuring out what it is.

It does, so far, seem to be a risk on asset, as it didn't perform well in March 2020.

It is already storing over $1 trillion of the world's wealth though, and in this case, money talks. Yes, it might have a correction, but the S&P 500 might as well.

That said, Bitcoin's properties may change over time, and it may become more of a hedge. It does seem to have a lot of believers, and IMO, the technology is what makes it very interesting.

It has been running successfully for a decade, and we'll be able to figure out more of what it is in 2, 3, or 5 years.

I think, why not hold some, even just a little bit? IMO, people shouldn't put 100% in, and definitely don't take out any loans to do so (maybe unless you are a company, but I'm against individuals taking loans out for it). You never know, maybe some of the current narratives are correct.

If a credit card is the example of a layer 2, with dollars being the base layer, would you say that dollars don't matter then, and the only thing that matters is the layer 2?

I would add that mining Bitcoin using by products of natural gas production, which would otherwise be burned (flared) or vented directly into the atmosphere, is being put into practice already [1].

1: https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-i...

Bitcoin is already storing over $1.1 trillion of the world's wealth which would currently put it in the top 10 global assets [1], as well as the top 10 global currencies based on M1 money supply [2]. It is also the best performing asset over the past 10 years [3]. It appears to already be a store of value.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap

[2] https://www.lopp.net/m1/rank.html

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-becomes-best-performi...

Good video. Peter Lynch does also say at some point in the video that he looks at what's happening now. I do think it is worth considering that some of the current asset classes are possibly in bubble territory, and some asset classes don't have high enough returns to preserve purchasing power. Historically, the stock market has done well, over time, no disagreement there.

Which asset classes would you diversify into?

The stock market is at all time highs.

Real estate is also at all time highs (depending on location, but in general).

Precious metals are not on track to beat inflation.

Treasury bonds are not on track to beat inflation.

The rates even on high yield savings accounts also do not beat inflation (and are relatively very low).

There is a concern that USD may be devaluing, due to all the money printing that has happened in 2020 and 2021.

I agree diversification is good, and I don't think it's good to be 100% invested in crypto, but I'm just curious how you would allocate your portfolio if you were in that situation.

Thank you for providing more details. I actually was in support of Bitcoin Cash around the time of the fork, but after some time, something about Bitcoin Cash and r/btc seemed off to me. Bitcoin Core and r/bitcoin seemed to be the more reasonable folks. Roger Ver's attitude in interviews did not help. If anything, his behavior made me think twice about holding Bitcoin Cash at all. I can see that some people feel this same thing about the Bitcoin Core devs though. Craig Scott Wright and the Bitcoin SV split also didn't inspire confidence in the Bitcoin Cash community for me. Anyway, at this point I'm trying to gather more information to see if it's worth buying back into Bitcoin Cash, so I appreciate this.

What about the arguments that I've heard that Bitcoin Cash / big blocks allow miners to make more money, and that could be why this whole discussion started in the first place?

I understand the argument that Blockstream has some bias, but it seems like there may be bias on the BCH side as well. If that's not the case, could you explain that in more detail?

I think the us vs them mentality is what is toxic, and I see that on both sides of the Bitcoin scaling discussion.

BCH may not be Roger Ver, but the main reason I don't currently hold BCH is because of Roger Ver. If he wasn't in the picture I would be much more apt to hold BCH. He comes across as very reactive. What's wrong with calling BCH bcash? Does he really need to blow up anytime someone calls it that?

I would like to support BCH but everyone I talk to who supports Bitcoin Cash comes across as so divisive on this matter. BTC obviously has an important place in the crypto ecosystem. To discount the price growth of BTC and its importance in the overall awareness of crypto to the public seems short sighted. Price does matter. All of these coins can exist.

What about Litecoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash? I don't see what benefits Bitcoin Cash has over Litecoin. It seems like the original idea for Litecoin was that it could be used more for day to day transactions, by reducing the block time. I question the need for Bitcoin Cash to begin with, when Litecoin was already available. I am curious of your thoughts on that.

I also saw you mentioned Dash. Is there a reason you didn't also include Z-Cash in your short list (I am genuinely curious).

I am aware of the r/bitcoin vs r/btc controversy and understand the r/bitcoin censorship concern. On the other hand, r/btc is not censored but they seem so anti Bitcoin Core / Lightning Network, it looks to me like they don't consider the other side at all.

From what I can tell, the Lightning Network could be a scaling solution. It is awesome to know that many BCH devs aren't opposed to a lightning implementation on BCH. I'd love to see these communities converge.

This is interesting. I am curious, which PoS coin implementations do you like?

If an attacker wanted to not raise the price of a coin, couldn't they use crypto OTC markets to buy large amounts while not raising the price (i've seen OTC at least marketed that way)?

Aren't cryptocurrencies also only a scarce resource if they have a hard supply cap? Or do you figure in something like inflation vs coin burning to this as well?

I do understand your point that the incentive to follow through on the attack decreases as the attacker accumulates more tokens, since it would be in their interest for the network to function properly at that point due to how many tokens / how much stake they have in the network.

The only reason I could see the attack making financial sense at that point would be if it was a competitor who was trying to kill a competing PoS network and it was worth it to them to do so in order to promote their own network (or maybe it could be a government trying to protect their fiat currency)?

You really think the entire world would shut off the internet?

It is much harder to transport gold and silver, and those can be easily confiscated. A mnemonic seed can be stored in your head, and you can add a passphrase as a salt on top of that to create an infinite number of permutations, each being their own wallet, and provide just one of those if under duress.

This changed in 2019 (https://ethereumworldnews.com/end-of-coinbase-pro-introduces...).

At this point, there is no way to trade for free on Coinbase or Coinbase Pro. However, maker orders do still have a lower fee vs taker orders on Coinbase Pro, depending on the pricing tier / how much you trade per month (https://help.coinbase.com/en/pro/trading-and-funding/trading...).

You see no benefit to a flat system in crypto where everyone can participate equally, vs traditional finance / stock brokerages where large institutions like hedge funds automatically get a better deal vs any retail trader?

Proof of Stake has yet to demonstrate as much resistence to adversarial attacks as Proof of Work.

An expert in the space, Andreas Antonopoulos, speaks to this topic here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0T49duRt74&t=2720s

A lot of the US crypto exchanges have high fees. They can get away with it due to US laws preventing US citizens from legally trading on asian exchanges, which have much more competitive fees (i.e. Binance.com, not Binance.US). Gemini has even more ridiculous fees than Coinbase. Also if you use Coinbase Pro, which is more like a stock brokerage account for crypto, you get a lot better fees than Coinbase.com. Gemini also has an equivalent to Coinbase Pro, except they call it ActiveTrader. Kraken, another reputable US crypto exchange, has decent fees in general. US securities laws are preventing US citizens from getting the best deal and US crypto exchanges are getting away with higher fees based on that.

Why doesn't it have a happy ending?

In terms of ethereum, do you mean ethereum smart contracts? The ethereum platform, as defined by it's creators, is actually quite technical. Anyone who spends the time to learn the Solidity language and what it takes to deploy a smart contract is free to, so yes there can be legitimate, illegitimate, poorly designed or well designed smart contracts, just like other software programs.

I thought it was considered rude to ask for take-home bags in countries like France. However, looks like that might be changing [1].

[1] https://www.frenchtoday.com/blog/french-culture/french-doggy...

For Chrome:

chrome://flags/#same-site-by-default-cookies

chrome://flags/#cookies-without-same-site-must-be-secure

I found that at least the #same-site-by-default-cookies flag behaved as I would expect when setting it to "Disabled". Use case was to load an iframe that sets it's own cookies with no SameSite value and still have that value default to "None".

We fixed this issue properly ("SameSite=None; Secure" in the cookie set in the iframe), but using the #same-site-by-default-cookies flag was a workaround for a little while.

What was a bit strange was the default behavior on Chrome was different for users even on the same Chrome version. They seemed to be rolling it out in phases. More info on that here: https://www.chromium.org/updates/same-site

Why not just chat with your coworkers on Slack or whatever your company's messaging platform is? I'm still having the same conversations online that I would in person.

Clarification that they are not based in Malta from Changpeng Zhao (CEO of Binance): https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1230860647086338048

Separate from international Binance (https://www.binance.com/en), but there is Binance US (https://www.binance.us/en).

I don't see how this is game over for Coinbase, Gemini, or any other of the US exchanges. Even if international exchanges have higher volume, these US cryptocurrency exchanges likely are not going away.

If the US supported cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, instead of considering regulation, we could keep up with innovation at least, instead of having other countries leave us in the dust in terms of developing the technology.

> I don't think it's at all far-fetched to suggest that if Mastercard or Andreessen Horowitz is in a position to decide how much of other people's money they're entitled to, they might decide that the answer is "all of it". Paypal and Google do this on a regular basis. Here in Argentina, the banking system decided that the answer was "75% of it" in 2001, with respect to dollars; in the US, the Federal Government did precisely the same thing in 1933 with gold.

The consensus model of blockchain would at least require Mastercard, Andreessen Horowitz and other validator nodes to be in agreement about stealing / being entitled to the money, which seems less likely. That said, this is one of the flaws of having only a few nodes validating transactions. Libra went this route instead of Bitcoin's proof of work consensus model. With Bitcoin's proof of work consensus, 51% of the miners in the world would have to collude in order to steal funds.

All of the comments I see that say blockchain has no use case, seem to miss another point you raise, in that Bitcoin can not be seized, even by government (like the US government did with Gold), unless they had miner control and the public didn't continue to operate and spin up new miner nodes. This seems unlikely considering that the miners could lose their funds, if they did not prevent a counterparty having 51% control of the network. This is a protection that Bitcoin has, that Libra does not. The government could go to corporations in the Libra association and tell them to do what they want.

In terms of other use cases, I think having an immutable ledger, that can't be changed by one party, or even a few parties with DB access, also seems like a compelling use case for blockchain / cryptocurrency. Libra isn't really a cryptocurrency by this standard though, although Bitcoin is.

Also, just to put it out there, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, Visa and a few others already have left the Libra association.

This is what I always guessed was the reason.