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Hedge fund warns White House is inflating crypto bubble that could wreak havoc
- zikduruqe 2y agohttps://archive.ph/JxNPr https://archive.ph/JxNPr
- MattGaiser 2y agoGiven that certain members of the White House are personally profiting from certain tokens, the havoc for others is their wealth creation.
- brianbest101 2y ago[dead]
- sigmoid10 2y agoHonestly, at this point the entire crypto industry is just leechers and con artists trying to rug-pull each other. And they elected their leader to the white house. I personally don't mind the whole system going down in flames. Perhaps when the dust settles and we need to rebuild from square one, we could get some normalcy again.
- londons_explore 2y agoI'll have the Normalcy Coin ($NRML) ready to launch as soon as that happens!!
- lesuorac 2y ago> And they elected their leader to the white house. I really don't think this is the correct way to view the 2024 elections. Incumbents did a bad job globally of addressing their constituents concerns (sure US has less inflation; that's like losing less limbs, still undesirable amount) and so lost to non-incumbents. It's not that non-incumbent had any great ideas for people to rally behind; it's that the incumbent had a proven poor record.
- 0dayz 2y agoWhile true it's a bit odd to leave out what a crazy administration the current one is.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoIt's not a full way to view the 2024 election, but the crypto con-men definitely got who they wanted in office.
- Balgair 2y agoI've been listening to Michael Lewis' (of Moneyball fame) latest podcast series about the sports gambling legalization. I'm struck by how the groups of young men, and gamblers, and vapers, and crypto bros are all a venn diagram that is mostly is just a circle, while even 5-ish years ago, that wasn't so much the truth. A lot changed in America to its young men, not a lot of it good. Young men broke for Trump very highly in 2024, they also seem to be garnering these addictions and long term problems by the armload. And most of these addictions seem to be more 'private' than they used to be. I don't know what to make of it, but I just get a bad vibe for young men.
- duxup 2y agoScams and I fear an effective bribery system.
- pjc50 2y ago> I personally don't mind the whole system going down in flames. As with the air crash the other day, the problem with the system going down in flames is how many people it takes out along the way.
- brookst 2y agoPeople way underestimate their exposure to this kind of thing. It’s always those undeserving people who will suffer, while I’ll be just fine. Turns out it doesn’t work that way. Hoping for a system collapse is hoping for personal disaster.
- disqard 2y agoThank you for articulating this! We're all susceptible to this "it won't affect me, because <insert-reason-here>" kind of thinking. Dimensions like "level of education", wealth, etc. don't really factor into it. Exhibit A: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79zxjj0j55o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79zxjj0j55o excerpt below (Gabriela is an undocumented immigrant): Some, like Gabriela, believe it won't impact them at all. "I'm not scared at all, actually," she said. "That's for criminals to worry about. I pay taxes, and I work." "In any case, I'm undocumented," she added. "[So] how would they even know about me?"
- nonelog 2y agoI'm pretty certain that the investment banks manipulate these markets heavily.
- crazygringo 2y agoIt's interesting to think about whether the word "bubble" even has any conceptual meaning when applied to crypto. A bubble means prices are historically high relative to fundamentals -- that the part of the price explained by speculation is much higher than usual. But crypto has no fundamentals. Its price is determined entirely by speculation. It doesn't pay dividends or interest that you can model a price on. So the idea of an "inflating crypto bubble" seems conceptually incoherent. Sure you can say that crypto is only bubble, but that doesn't really add any information. The bubble can't be "inflating" since there's no ratio to a non-bubble version.
- heliodor 2y agoHow can you possibly say it has no fundamentals? Here are some use cases that give it a non-zero value: It competes with Western Union for money transfers. It provides ways to transfer money to places and for things the US government doesn't approve of.
- crazygringo 2y agoThose are uses. They aren't fundamentals, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis Money transfers aren't setting the value of crypto. They don't meaningfully affect the supply and demand, since the goal of a transfer is generally to hold the crypto for as short of a period as possible, to minimize price fluctuation risk -- so supply and demand are balanced without changing the price.
- wat10000 2y agoThat’s circular. Those use cases only work if it has value. If they’re the only reason it has value in the first place then it’s a house of cards.
- louthy 2y ago> It provides ways to transfer money to places and for things the US government doesn't approve of. You can just say “facilitates crime”, it’s easier and isn’t doublespeak
- newsclues 2y agoOpposed to other government inflated bubbles, why is this bad?
- ADeerAppeared 2y agoLook at Albania for why this is bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania Crypto is different from things like housing (where the "bubble" is merely artificially restricted supply driving the price up, so it's a real price increase) or the stock market (Where the fundamentals are real enough that a crash in e.g. AI-stocks will hurt, but not be systemically-destructive. Nvidia, microsoft, etc are all still going to exist as very profitable companies)
- tim333 2y agoBubbles bursting can reduce spending and cause recessions. See the 2006-2008 housing bubble and aftermath for example. Crypto bubbles aren't as bad as housing bubbles because everyone treats crypto as a kind of gambling but many rely on their property investments.
- cranberryturkey 2y agopeople said it was a bubble at $4.
- brookst 2y agoIn 1635 they said it was crazy for tulip bulbs to be selling for 5 florins. They peaked at 5500.
- tudorconstantin 2y agoBut once that bubble (and any other one) burst, it never reached new highs again. The bitcoin bubble burst multiple times and got back higher and higher
- cranberryturkey 2y agoflowers and digital currency are not the same.
- thw12318 2y agoThe US is now officially a banana republic with nuclear weapons. Want to reward your oligarch supporters? Pump bitcoin and AI and infiltrate the government organizations with the blockchain. The oligarchs want data centers in Greenland (and feel like in a Tolkien novel, which is the whole scope of their education)? Threaten EU vassals to take it. The EU needs to decouple from the dollar, get a strong nuclear arsenal and end taking instructions against its own interests. Block the large US tech companies, which are largely for entertainment anyway and trade with China, which produces real things.
- TrackerFF 2y agoIt should be obvious, but the gov. buying crypto is about providing (exit) liquidity to whales.
- jbverschoor 2y ago2021: ”Elliott Management wants nothing to do with bitcoin, says top exec who predicts the Fed will launch an 'electronic dollar' that will crush crypto.” I guess maybe they shorted a little too much and now trying to save their own ass
- feverzsj 2y agoIt's not a bubble anymore, as criminals, immigrants, speculators or even countries like Russia and N.Korea deeply rely on it, which make it valuable.
- deadbabe 2y agoHow does crypto eventually die? Do people en masse suddenly decide they will never buy or sell crypto, because the price has gotten so high any % gains are going to be way smaller than other investments so what’s the point? Will birth rates fall so much that the population of naive young people, who are the main buyers of crypto, won’t be enough to sustain the whole scheme?
- TrackerFF 2y agoIt dies when governments make it illegal, and so hard and expensive to use, that the cons far outweigh the pros. One such scenario would be if crypto suddenly became a real threat to whatever fiat a country uses. If BTC became a legit threat to USD, you can be sure the gov. would do everything in their power to remove BTC. Maybe a realistic example would be if, say, BRICS countries suddenly colluded to stop using USD, and only use BTC as a currency.
- tim333 2y agoThat doesn't work unless all governments do that. China banned crypto for the most part but on it goes.
- tim333 2y agoIt won't die. It may get more or less popular but bitcoin is fundamentally a piece of open source software that can't be destroyed unless you track down every copy on earth and delete everything. And even then people would still have the knowledge of it. You can't uninvent it.
- suraci 2y agoi suggest everyone who want to know the nature of crypto coin to read Das Kapital The modern sovereign credit monetary system and the rise of financial innovation products have led most people into the illusion that "commodities are money." However, the truth is quite the opposite. A very simple perspective: Bitcoin prices are highly correlated with the stock market. However, this does not mean that cryptos are not worth investing in. It just means they are not inherently more magical than other virtual financial products—at least for now.
- EugeneG 2y agoStocks and crypto are fundamentally different. Stocks give you a legal right to the assets and future profits of a company - a legal right enforced by the government (i.e. men with guns). Crypto gives you no such right. In crypto you just hope someone else will pay more for it later. In that sense crypto is similar to baseball cards, and slightly similar to gold (gold has some industrial “actual” uses, but its high price is really driven by cultural perception of value.)
- blased 2y agoYour argument for "crypto" applies to money. Money will lose 90% of its value over a century or so. In this case I don't have to "just hope someone else will pay more for it later" I know that money will be practically worthless if held.
- EugeneG 2y agoI kind of agree. Money (e.g. the dollar) only has value because (1) we implicitly agreed as a society to have faith that it can be accepted by others for goods and services (2) the government requires us to pay a material part of our earnings as taxes which can only be paid using money. If people lost faith, it would lose value. Mild inflation (say 2-3pct a year) is considered generally good by economists. It’s an incentive to go and invest the money productively or spend that money on goods and services (which is good for growing the economy). Deflation in contrast would create an incentive to hoard money (just keep little papers with no productive value).
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoMichael Burry has called BTC a "bubble" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry https://fortune.com/2021/03/01/bitcoin-bubble-michael-burry-big-short-investing-btc/ https://fortune.com/2021/03/01/bitcoin-bubble-michael-burry-... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/why-the-big-short-guys-think-bitcoin-is-a-bubble.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/why-the-big-short-gu... Elliott Investment Management has previously called Nvidia's stock "overhyped" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Investment_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Investment_Management Elliott is the hedge fund source for this FT article https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hedge-fund-elliott-says-ai-132813734.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hedge-fund-elliott-says-ai-13... https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/elliott-says-nvidia-is-in-a-bubble-and-ai-is-overhyped-ft https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/elliott-says-nvidia-is-in-...
- throw0101d 2y ago(Semi-)jokey observation: > The main argument for a Strategic BItcoin Reserve seems to be that Bitcoin holders worry about an impending shortage of greater fools and need the US government to act as the greatest fool of last resort. * https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1870564077535470079 https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1870564077535470079
- rosiesophia10 2y ago[dead]