5 ms·
One major company (eg. Apple) making a major purchase of Crypto is likely to cause serious havoc.
by pjkundert 6y ago
One major company (eg. Apple) making a major purchase of Crypto is likely to cause serious havoc.
- sethhochberg 6y agoThis is basically what caused the spike we see in BTC price this week - Tesla purchased a lot of the stuff (somewhere around $1.5bn USD worth at their purchase time), and announced plans to start accepting it for their cars.
- pjkundert 6y agoTesla is only “major” to guys like us. Nobody in the masses really even knows or cares about them. Just like Crypto; nobody really knows about it — it’s just a big scary thing they don’t understand, that they are vaguely aware they’re maybe missing out on. When big names they actually know and invest in (Apple, Walmart, Citibank, ...) start investing, they’ll force their investment guy to get them some. Nobody (ie. 99% of the population) will, can, or should hold Crypto personally. They will just lose it. Disclaimer: I write cryptocurrency systems, have been involved with it since way before Bitcoin, and have tried to help “normals” invest. It is simply not. going. to. happen. The next gen stuff we’re working on? Now, that’s something normals could use. Safe, secure, error-resilient, forgiving. Something dad can set up and use without help. But in the mean time; DeFi alone is going to tear the doors off, let alone all the other uses.
- TechBro8615 6y agoIf being one of the top ten largest companies in the world by market cap does not qualify Tesla as “major,” I’m not sure what will.
- gher-shyu3i 6y ago> Disclaimer: I write cryptocurrency systems, have been involved with it since way before Bitcoin, and have tried to help “normals” invest. It is simply not. going. to. happen. What do you think the future of cryptocurrencies is if the vast majority of regular people won't invest in it?
- pjkundert 6y agoIt's not that they "won't"; they can't; it's just too complex and fragile for normals to want to understand and use safely. Heck, even most of us don't use Shamir's Secret Sharing to secure our private keys (or any other really robust method for securing/sharing). We all know what its like to help normals manage their password (!) for their 5 accounts... Beyond that, there is a fixation on A) Global consensus systems, and B) Deflationary assets -- neither of these can or should form the foundation of what we call "money"; too fragile and dangerous. See https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency/ https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency... However, next-generation offerings are promising to solve most of these shortcoming, including one that I'm helping implement presently. These could be useful to normal people, and quite easily wrap existing assets (Crypto and others) in value-stable and robustly exchangeable tokens. Many people will try to play with crypto, and will blow off their fingers while these systems get ready for release.
- gher-shyu3i 6y agoWhy are deflationary assets bad for the economy? We've been using gold and silver (as well as commodities that can go a long time such as wheat, barley, dates, etc.) as currency for a long time now. That's a good balance we should strive to go back to. We shouldn't let the government and banks be able to print money at will, devaluing the hard work that people put to get their money in the first place. The people shouldn't have to pay the price of the government debt when it prints more money to cover its interest bearing loans. I am quite certain that this is one of the sources of distress that many people in the lower socioeconomic scale have towards the very rich, and I can't blame them. What do you think it feels like to work and save your money for the future, when the government actively makes it worth less?
- pjkundert 6y agoAbsolutely agree with everything you said. However, it conflates two separate concerns. 1) Inflationary or Deflationary assets aren't useful money. Everyone wants to get rid of the former, and nobody will spend the latter. The very reason that gold and silver are useful money is because they traditionally have not inflated or deflated; they'll buy more or less (in real terms) about what they did 2,000 years ago. They only appear to be Deflationary, because we operate in such an Inflationary monetary milieu. 2) Return on investment on cash. Investing (lending) cash should return an ROI. It only does not because of central-bank interest rate interference. When we return to direct monetization, ie. wealth --> money without a banker in the middle, and algorithmically value-stable money, this will spell the doom of our tragic central-bank fiat-money experiment. This day is coming, sooner than anyone expects... ;)
- modeless 6y agoAlready happened. Tesla is a major company now. #7 by market cap in the world. Bonkers, I know. I don't see others following soon, but you never know.
- mywittyname 6y ago> I don't see others following soon, but you never know. If other companies were going to accept BTC, they would have done so already. If you remember 5-7 years ago, there was a big push to accept BTC, so much so that local coffee shops and even NPR started accepting it for a brief period. I think Telsa is doing it to combat the short sellers that Musk is at war with. The $1.5 billion in BTC they purchased represents something like 2% of their net asset value and the prices of BTC can be readily manipulated up or down rather significantly with relatively little capital. Musk and his team are all much brighter and savvier than I am, so I could be wrong. But this strategy makes a lot of sense in context, especially considering the market cap of Telsa has reached absurd levels (growing 800% in one year).
- pjkundert 6y agoCrypto will be an asset class, never “money”. Nobody will generally buy stuff with it; except maybe other asset classes of investment. Fungible, large-scale, value-stable, user- and network-failure resilient cryptocurrency “money” is on the way, though. That’s going to be interesting.