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What's the point, you ask... Here is Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, describing "the point" for an hour: https://www.microstrategy.com/en/b

What's the point, you ask... Here is Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, describing "the point" for an hour: https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin/videos/bitcoin-macro-strategy https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin/videos/bitcoin-macr... It sounds like you've made up your mind about Bitcoin, but I believe you've missed the big picture. The above video, if you watch it with an open mind, will help you to glimpse it. Hint: it's not about cappuccino, it's about living in a world of competitively devaluing currencies and resulting asset inflation.

arcticbull 6y ago
You haven't shared "the point" just a link to MicroStrategy, a failed software company whose CEO had to pay an $11 million dollar SEC settlement decades ago for cooking the books, making a desperate Hail Mary play buying near the top of a speculative mania in a bid to gain relevancy. MSTR is the new "Long Island Iced Tea" -> "Long Blockchain Inc" rebrand [1] Humorously enough, the same is roughly true of Tesla, a car company which sells 5% as many cars at Toyota while valued about twice what the entire rest of the car market put together is worth. Their only source of profit is selling carbon credits to traditional automakers who won't need them anymore as they're all moving electric too. One more Hail Mary distraction to maintain the one thousand three hundred P/E ratio. In a manufacturing business. Not software with zero marginal cost. Manufacturing. The industry average P/E is right around 15. > ...it's about living in a world of competitively devaluing currencies and resulting asset inflation. Currency is an intentionally-lossy temporary store of value. It only needs to hold its value for as long as it takes you to buy assets with them. At 2% inflation it does. Anything else is a straw-man you'd recognize if you attended ECON 101. Asset inflation isn't inflation, it's an ROI. CPI is inflation. This is a typical set of r/Bitcoin talking points that are easily debunked. [1] https://qz.com/1659246/the-fbi-wants-more-information-about-long-blockchain/ https://qz.com/1659246/the-fbi-wants-more-information-about-...
- throwaway20875 6y ago
  >CPI is inflation Lol
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Right, yeah, if you pretend how much AAPL appreciated matters to anyone, asset inflation counts. Otherwise, it's CPI, and [citation needed] if you want to posit otherwise.
    - danhak 6y ago
      Housing, healthcare, education and childcare costs matter. I don’t believe CPI is accurately capturing the skyrocketing costs of these things, which are the most significant expenses for most households.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        And yet you and everyone else are unable to produce any meaningful sources or analysis that justify your beliefs. [citation needed] and we can talk about it. Healthcare is a social policy matter, not monetary policy, and nothing to do with increase in the money supply. You take that up with your representatives not the Fed. Housing is a function of city council zoning policy. You take that up with your city council not the Fed, or with the federal government it you want Japanese style zoning rules. [1] Childcare is social policy, not monetary policy, and you take that up with your representatives not the Fed. You can't just point to anything you don't like and say the Fed Did It or is responsible for it. All they do is control the money supply. Nothing more. A reduction in your welfare isn't inflation. Necessities can outpace inflation. It's bad social policy, but it happens. What you fail to understand is that these prices will continue to outstrip a platonic ideal even if denominated in Bitcoin because the increase in pricing has nothing to do with monetary policy. Any temporary reprieve is due to speculative mania. [1] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
        chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > the increase in pricing has nothing to do with monetary policy. This is incorrect.
- jerry1979 6y ago
  CPI probably doesn't reflect inflation the way Fed looks at it. They use PCE[1]: >An accurate measure of inflation is important for both the U.S. federal government and the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), but they focus on different measures. For example, the federal government uses the CPI to make inflation adjustments to certain kinds of benefits, such as Social Security.[3] In contrast, the FOMC focuses on PCE inflation in its quarterly economic projections and also states its longer-run inflation goal in terms of headline PCE. [1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/july-2013/cpi-vs-pce-inflation--choosing-a-standard-measure https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...
  - imtringued 6y ago
    That's quite interesting but the overall picture is the same in both CPI and PCE. It's just another way to measure inflation in consumer goods and services. Compare that to the usual Bitcoin advocates talking about inflation of the dollar relative to Bitcoin. It's measuring something completely different.
- DSingularity 6y ago
  You know, your point about Tesla has given me lots of conflict. What did I miss? Obviously this question came when I sold off my TSLA stock at 500$ thinking — it was overvalued — and then watching it rise to the equivalent of 4,000$. I reached the conclusion it’s no longer solely about cash flow and debt ratios and market cap and addressable market and whatever other traditional metrics we previously used to value companies. The emotional component has become more important. People are buying TSLA because they want to do something about climate change. Or maybe cause they worship Musk. This is probably holding for other companies in other industries. Bitcoin is definitely not only being bought because it’s digital gold. It’s being bought because people are emotionally attached to resetting the system. A bunch of middle fingers to the dollar rich (Bitcoin poor) by a bunch dollar poor (Bitcoin rich). This is why people are buying BTC. Whether it is TSLA or BTC — value itself is being disrupted.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > People are buying TSLA because they want to do something about climate change. I hope given Tesla's new affinity with Bitcoin that what they want to do is "make it worse" lol. Tesla is literally selling its green energy credits to dirty car companies, then throwing it at Chinese coal miners. The market goes through particularly bubblicious periods of pricing mania from time to time. It's happening now, it's happened before, and it'll happen again. I wouldn't read too much into it. "..in the short run, the market is like a voting machine--tallying up which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine--assessing the substance of a company." - Benjamin Graham Prior to the pandemic stimmy money, poor people weren't investing and middle class folks were. When the pandemic hit, poor people lost their jobs, middle class folks kept them. Both poor and middle class folks received stimmy money. The middle class folks invested it. The whole run up there were trillions on the side-line, and folks who remember 2008 weren't about to let another V shaped recovery pass them by. They plowed money into whatever they could. Literally everything exploded in value last year. My personal trading account is up almost 14X on a 1-year basis today. It's nothing to do with fundamentals, just a bubble. It'll revert in time, and then it'll grow again.
    - 6y ago
- janoside 6y ago
  Your view on currency exposes your extremely elitist bias. Are you aware that a large portion of the population is unable to purchase assets? What do you say to these people? What do you say as the dollars they earn pay less of their rent? Less of their healthcare? Soon...less of their groceries?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Nah quite the opposite. The world has had 14 years to buy Bitcoin. Happened at the same time as the iPhone. Everyone in these poor countries has iPhones or android devices and nobody wants Bitcoin for them except the first world pushers. I defer to the locals. If they thought it was any good they’d use it. They don’t. I would tell those people that if their government is broken they have bigger problems than their currency and once they solve their leadership problems the currency won’t be an issue anymore. Tough but true. Nothing there changes with Bitcoin and it’s $20 transaction fees.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
BTCOG 6y ago
These people are all disingenuous actors. They know the point, but they want to flood all of these threads and act clueless. Bitcoin is digital gold, gold's replacement. It's been here for 12 years and yet, all these actors show up in every Bitcoin thread. It's the greatest monetary shift in hundreds of years. ArcticBull below me shows up in EVERY single Bitcoin thread to trash talk Bitcoin. Here's where we are at; some love Bitcoin, and others show up just to talk trash. Bitcoin is only going to grow beyond $100k the next couple years regardless of how sourly "ArcticBull" wants to astroturf.
- raiyu 6y ago
  Bitcoin is a modern day example of what happens when you have a currency that has deflation instead of inflation at it's core. It becomes actually more expensive to buy anything in the present, as a result, consumers stop purchasing, and as a result economic activity decreases. DigitalGold is also non-sensical, because that is simply designed to track against inflation, to prevent the loss of today's buying power tomorrow because of inflation. But when something appreciates 10,000x it's not really a hedge against inflation anymore, but a different speculative instrument entirely.
  - BTCOG 6y ago
    @ArcticBull - Why would I ever want to make 100% ROI on a rigged stock market when I've made thousands of % in hard money?
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      see, with those glasses on it's not possible to have a real meaningful conversation. I'm sorry, bitcoin is in no way 'hard money'.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      The irony behind bubbles is that you cannot profit off of them by acting rationally. If everyone participating in the bubble were acting 100% rationally, the bubble wouldn't exist in the first place.
whobar 6y ago
Hedge fund managers are never going to publicise an impartial view about anything, especially not something they are heavily invested in. Forming a positive opinion about Bitcoin based on what two hedge fund managers, both bullish on BTC, have to say, seems pretty dumb. Unless fiat is abolished, the price of something in BTC will always be pegged to USD. As USD devalues as a result of inflation, the price of a product in BTC decreases. I don't see the difference between someone in Venezuela choosing to hold their net worth in BTC (which could halve at any moment), versus their native, rapid inflationary currency. Both are risky, but if the central bank sorted itself out and fixed the currency issue, no one will have any reason to hold BTC any more.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Indeed - if your government is crap, you have bigger problems to worry about than your currency. Once you sort out the government you no longer have to worry about your currency. There's no world where simultaneously you have an untrustworthy government and you can bandaid over it with crypto.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- lottin 6y ago
  Please don't fall for the trap of calling actual money fiat as if bitcoin wasn't fiat. If at some point bitcoin becomes money it will be fiat money, as bitcoin is not backed by a commodity. So far bitcoin isn't money because it's not the most liquid asset. In order to buy anything with bitcoins, first you'll have sell them for actual money and use that to buy stuff, hence not money.
  - TwoHeadedBeast 6y ago
    Good point, I think they've borrowed the terminology from goldbugs without really understanding it.
codebolt 6y ago
Any real value analysis of Bitcoin that doesn't take Tether into account isn't worth much. As long as the whole crypto market is built around a currency issued by an unregulated and unaudited company with a mile-long list of past controversies, any unbiased take on the future of Bitcoin has to allow for a significant downside risk.
- heterodoxxed 6y ago
  Tether is a real Michael Burry moment for me. They claim to have 30 billion in reserves right now and are "printing" a billion tethers at a time. Yet nobody can confirm their reserves and the company itself is absurdly opaque. Either there is an incredible amount of criminal fraud behind this or... this is perfectly reasonable? Except nobody can really explain or confirm why.
  - codebolt 6y ago
    Yes, but as long as nothing is stopping them from simply minting out of thin air, I wouldn't bet against their ability to keep pushing the prices up. Daily volumes of tether trades are consistently a high multiple of the total supply. (Today it's 130bln vs 30bln.) So I don't know if it's safe to even trust that number. As per Steins law, anything that cannot go on forever must eventually stop. Question is how long?
  - fl0wenol 6y ago
    If they want non-idiots to use their stuff, then they need to open up and give a few tours of their "vaults" or whatever.

arcticbull 6y ago

You haven't shared "the point" just a link to MicroStrategy, a failed software company whose CEO had to pay an $11 million dollar SEC settlement decades ago for cooking the books, making a desperate Hail Mary play buying near the top of a speculative mania in a bid to gain relevancy. MSTR is the new "Long Island Iced Tea" -> "Long Blockchain Inc" rebrand [1] Humorously enough, the same is roughly true of Tesla, a car company which sells 5% as many cars at Toyota while valued about twice what the entire rest of the car market put together is worth. Their only source of profit is selling carbon credits to traditional automakers who won't need them anymore as they're all moving electric too. One more Hail Mary distraction to maintain the one thousand three hundred P/E ratio. In a manufacturing business. Not software with zero marginal cost. Manufacturing. The industry average P/E is right around 15. > ...it's about living in a world of competitively devaluing currencies and resulting asset inflation. Currency is an intentionally-lossy temporary store of value. It only needs to hold its value for as long as it takes you to buy assets with them. At 2% inflation it does. Anything else is a straw-man you'd recognize if you attended ECON 101. Asset inflation isn't inflation, it's an ROI. CPI is inflation. This is a typical set of r/Bitcoin talking points that are easily debunked. [1] https://qz.com/1659246/the-fbi-wants-more-information-about-long-blockchain/ https://qz.com/1659246/the-fbi-wants-more-information-about-...

throwaway20875 6y ago
>CPI is inflation Lol
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Right, yeah, if you pretend how much AAPL appreciated matters to anyone, asset inflation counts. Otherwise, it's CPI, and [citation needed] if you want to posit otherwise.
  - danhak 6y ago
    Housing, healthcare, education and childcare costs matter. I don’t believe CPI is accurately capturing the skyrocketing costs of these things, which are the most significant expenses for most households.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      And yet you and everyone else are unable to produce any meaningful sources or analysis that justify your beliefs. [citation needed] and we can talk about it. Healthcare is a social policy matter, not monetary policy, and nothing to do with increase in the money supply. You take that up with your representatives not the Fed. Housing is a function of city council zoning policy. You take that up with your city council not the Fed, or with the federal government it you want Japanese style zoning rules. [1] Childcare is social policy, not monetary policy, and you take that up with your representatives not the Fed. You can't just point to anything you don't like and say the Fed Did It or is responsible for it. All they do is control the money supply. Nothing more. A reduction in your welfare isn't inflation. Necessities can outpace inflation. It's bad social policy, but it happens. What you fail to understand is that these prices will continue to outstrip a platonic ideal even if denominated in Bitcoin because the increase in pricing has nothing to do with monetary policy. Any temporary reprieve is due to speculative mania. [1] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > the increase in pricing has nothing to do with monetary policy. This is incorrect.
jerry1979 6y ago
CPI probably doesn't reflect inflation the way Fed looks at it. They use PCE[1]: >An accurate measure of inflation is important for both the U.S. federal government and the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), but they focus on different measures. For example, the federal government uses the CPI to make inflation adjustments to certain kinds of benefits, such as Social Security.[3] In contrast, the FOMC focuses on PCE inflation in its quarterly economic projections and also states its longer-run inflation goal in terms of headline PCE. [1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/july-2013/cpi-vs-pce-inflation--choosing-a-standard-measure https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...
- imtringued 6y ago
  That's quite interesting but the overall picture is the same in both CPI and PCE. It's just another way to measure inflation in consumer goods and services. Compare that to the usual Bitcoin advocates talking about inflation of the dollar relative to Bitcoin. It's measuring something completely different.
DSingularity 6y ago
You know, your point about Tesla has given me lots of conflict. What did I miss? Obviously this question came when I sold off my TSLA stock at 500$ thinking — it was overvalued — and then watching it rise to the equivalent of 4,000$. I reached the conclusion it’s no longer solely about cash flow and debt ratios and market cap and addressable market and whatever other traditional metrics we previously used to value companies. The emotional component has become more important. People are buying TSLA because they want to do something about climate change. Or maybe cause they worship Musk. This is probably holding for other companies in other industries. Bitcoin is definitely not only being bought because it’s digital gold. It’s being bought because people are emotionally attached to resetting the system. A bunch of middle fingers to the dollar rich (Bitcoin poor) by a bunch dollar poor (Bitcoin rich). This is why people are buying BTC. Whether it is TSLA or BTC — value itself is being disrupted.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > People are buying TSLA because they want to do something about climate change. I hope given Tesla's new affinity with Bitcoin that what they want to do is "make it worse" lol. Tesla is literally selling its green energy credits to dirty car companies, then throwing it at Chinese coal miners. The market goes through particularly bubblicious periods of pricing mania from time to time. It's happening now, it's happened before, and it'll happen again. I wouldn't read too much into it. "..in the short run, the market is like a voting machine--tallying up which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine--assessing the substance of a company." - Benjamin Graham Prior to the pandemic stimmy money, poor people weren't investing and middle class folks were. When the pandemic hit, poor people lost their jobs, middle class folks kept them. Both poor and middle class folks received stimmy money. The middle class folks invested it. The whole run up there were trillions on the side-line, and folks who remember 2008 weren't about to let another V shaped recovery pass them by. They plowed money into whatever they could. Literally everything exploded in value last year. My personal trading account is up almost 14X on a 1-year basis today. It's nothing to do with fundamentals, just a bubble. It'll revert in time, and then it'll grow again.
  - 6y ago
janoside 6y ago
Your view on currency exposes your extremely elitist bias. Are you aware that a large portion of the population is unable to purchase assets? What do you say to these people? What do you say as the dollars they earn pay less of their rent? Less of their healthcare? Soon...less of their groceries?
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Nah quite the opposite. The world has had 14 years to buy Bitcoin. Happened at the same time as the iPhone. Everyone in these poor countries has iPhones or android devices and nobody wants Bitcoin for them except the first world pushers. I defer to the locals. If they thought it was any good they’d use it. They don’t. I would tell those people that if their government is broken they have bigger problems than their currency and once they solve their leadership problems the currency won’t be an issue anymore. Tough but true. Nothing there changes with Bitcoin and it’s $20 transaction fees.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

BTCOG 6y ago

These people are all disingenuous actors. They know the point, but they want to flood all of these threads and act clueless. Bitcoin is digital gold, gold's replacement. It's been here for 12 years and yet, all these actors show up in every Bitcoin thread. It's the greatest monetary shift in hundreds of years. ArcticBull below me shows up in EVERY single Bitcoin thread to trash talk Bitcoin. Here's where we are at; some love Bitcoin, and others show up just to talk trash. Bitcoin is only going to grow beyond $100k the next couple years regardless of how sourly "ArcticBull" wants to astroturf.

raiyu 6y ago
Bitcoin is a modern day example of what happens when you have a currency that has deflation instead of inflation at it's core. It becomes actually more expensive to buy anything in the present, as a result, consumers stop purchasing, and as a result economic activity decreases. DigitalGold is also non-sensical, because that is simply designed to track against inflation, to prevent the loss of today's buying power tomorrow because of inflation. But when something appreciates 10,000x it's not really a hedge against inflation anymore, but a different speculative instrument entirely.
- BTCOG 6y ago
  @ArcticBull - Why would I ever want to make 100% ROI on a rigged stock market when I've made thousands of % in hard money?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    see, with those glasses on it's not possible to have a real meaningful conversation. I'm sorry, bitcoin is in no way 'hard money'.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    The irony behind bubbles is that you cannot profit off of them by acting rationally. If everyone participating in the bubble were acting 100% rationally, the bubble wouldn't exist in the first place.

whobar 6y ago

Hedge fund managers are never going to publicise an impartial view about anything, especially not something they are heavily invested in. Forming a positive opinion about Bitcoin based on what two hedge fund managers, both bullish on BTC, have to say, seems pretty dumb. Unless fiat is abolished, the price of something in BTC will always be pegged to USD. As USD devalues as a result of inflation, the price of a product in BTC decreases. I don't see the difference between someone in Venezuela choosing to hold their net worth in BTC (which could halve at any moment), versus their native, rapid inflationary currency. Both are risky, but if the central bank sorted itself out and fixed the currency issue, no one will have any reason to hold BTC any more.

arcticbull 6y ago
Indeed - if your government is crap, you have bigger problems to worry about than your currency. Once you sort out the government you no longer have to worry about your currency. There's no world where simultaneously you have an untrustworthy government and you can bandaid over it with crypto.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lottin 6y ago
Please don't fall for the trap of calling actual money fiat as if bitcoin wasn't fiat. If at some point bitcoin becomes money it will be fiat money, as bitcoin is not backed by a commodity. So far bitcoin isn't money because it's not the most liquid asset. In order to buy anything with bitcoins, first you'll have sell them for actual money and use that to buy stuff, hence not money.
- TwoHeadedBeast 6y ago
  Good point, I think they've borrowed the terminology from goldbugs without really understanding it.

codebolt 6y ago

Any real value analysis of Bitcoin that doesn't take Tether into account isn't worth much. As long as the whole crypto market is built around a currency issued by an unregulated and unaudited company with a mile-long list of past controversies, any unbiased take on the future of Bitcoin has to allow for a significant downside risk.

heterodoxxed 6y ago
Tether is a real Michael Burry moment for me. They claim to have 30 billion in reserves right now and are "printing" a billion tethers at a time. Yet nobody can confirm their reserves and the company itself is absurdly opaque. Either there is an incredible amount of criminal fraud behind this or... this is perfectly reasonable? Except nobody can really explain or confirm why.
- codebolt 6y ago
  Yes, but as long as nothing is stopping them from simply minting out of thin air, I wouldn't bet against their ability to keep pushing the prices up. Daily volumes of tether trades are consistently a high multiple of the total supply. (Today it's 130bln vs 30bln.) So I don't know if it's safe to even trust that number. As per Steins law, anything that cannot go on forever must eventually stop. Question is how long?
- fl0wenol 6y ago
  If they want non-idiots to use their stuff, then they need to open up and give a few tours of their "vaults" or whatever.