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Alex Jones too... The majority of this blog is just conspiracy-p0rn.

Anyway, if you are really interested in actual related news and facts just follow https://www.theblockcrypto.com or similar.


Correction: low liquidity of the majority of cryptocurrencies/tokens. BTC has by far the best liquidity among the cryptocurrencies.


Still very low compared to normal markets, I would think.


Yes.

S&P 500 E-mini futures have a notional value of roughly $147,000 right now, and on average, 1-2 million contracts change hands daily.

On average, about 35 billion dollars of SPY, a single S&P 500 ETF is traded daily.

It's hard to find accurate BTC average daily volume numbers, but probably somewhere between 1 and 10 billion dollars daily.

So yes, bitcoin is an extremely thin market compared to the market depth of 2 extremely liquid assets, both of which pale in comparison to the 550 billion USD daily volume of the treasuries market.

BTC does have the tightest bid/ask spread of pretty much any asset that is traded, as a percentage of the asset's value. It's typically a penny to a few cents on the major exchanges, which is a few thousandths of a percent.


so is market cap


Best != good.


i guess you need to define what "good" means in this context


Sony had their cloud gaming phase back on 2012 when they acquired Gaikai for $380m. Not sure what happened with them, maybe it was before its time.


PlayStation Now is still a thing, you can subscribe to play lots of PS3 and PS4 games on it, they run on Sony's servers and are streamed to your local device.


Not anymore -- while they still offer that feature, it's downplayed in favor of a Netflix-style rotating library of games that are downloaded and run on local hardware.


PS3 games are still only available through streaming though, and PS Now is also available on PC where cloud streaming is the only option supplied.


PlayStation Now still exists.


Gaikai became PS Now, which streams a selection of PS3 games on demand


It's the technology behind Share Play, isn't it?


However, that's not quite front-running in the established sense.

That paper is about a side-effect based on the design of "Decentralized Exchanges" on Ethereum and similar systems. That's why people should always dive in the details of those blockchain solutions; not only you have implementation issues, but even design issues where the "solution" falls apart when game theory is accounted for all actors and interactions with the network.

Unfortunately, the complexity of such "decentralized solutions" makes it easy to miss a lot of issues. Even with audits that cost thousands of dollars per case, you still have several cases where serious vulnerabilities go unnoticed.


This is one of the worst crypto-debit cards I've seen. Coinbase's card has a "Crypto Liquidation Fee": 2.49% of transaction. (Even Gemini, the most expensive cryptoexchange has 1% exchange fees, while the median is probably around 0.2%)

You are better off selling manually on an exchange (0.1-0.25% fees) and transferring to a sane bank with debit cards and minimal fees like N26(EU) or Charles Schwab(US).

Have a fiat buffer, but control your holdings and don't get milk by fee-vampires like Coinbase.


Or you could skip a step and just use a regular credit card with cash rewards and receive 1-2% of transaction amounts cash back.

I'm not sure why people want to make it harder (and more expensive) than necessary.


But then you're missing the whole point - storing your money in a deflationary currency.

I moved 95% of my savings into cryptocurrencies years ago, and it's been orders of magnitude better than the silly 1-2%.


And some people moved their savings into cryptocurrencies half a year ago and it's been orders of magnitude worse than the silly 1-2%.

Kind of like advising putting your savings in naked options plays because it worked for you that one time.


The difference is, inflationary currency is guaranteed to lose value over long term. One-year fluctuations are not very important to me, this is short-term thinking.

That's why even now I buy as much cryptocurrency as I can.


> The difference is, inflationary currency is guaranteed to lose value over long term. One-year fluctuations are not very important to me, this is short-term thinking.

The whole point of currency is short-term; it's the virtual particle of the economy intended to lubricate the flow of useful goods without incentivizing hoarding of itself over investment in productive assets.


> The whole point of currency is short-term

Not if you're saving for retirement or your kid's college fund.

We never had any deflationary currencies till recently. Now we have a choice.

If you want to quickly spend your money, go right ahead, nobody is stopping you.

I prefer to spend for what I need, and save the rest, and it's been working great so far. That's what most financial advisers advise anyway - live within your means, and create a financial cushion.


> > The whole point of currency is short-term

> Not if you're saving for retirement or your kid's college fund.

No, even there: it's to be the short-term stable thing you trade other stuff (for most people, labor) for and then use to buy the productive asset you invest for those purpose. It's an important part of the process, just not the final vehicle.

It is very much not for direct use as the final vehicle for those purposes itself, because the attributes which make something good as a long-term investment are very different than those that make it good as currency. (Savings accounts, which still are only good for fairly short-term reserves and not the purposes you lay out, aren't the same as raw currency.)


>One-year fluctuations are not very important to me, this is short-term thinking.

Very easy to say this when 6 month fluctuations haven't wiped out your savings.

People with this same thinking got in 6 months ago and have lost more than 50% of their savings.

When this happens during a recession it's everyone, the government is working to fix it, the world literally grinds to a halt and tries to dig out of it.

When this happens in BTC it's a "yearly occurrence" and "don't worry just HODL".


> People with this same thinking got in 6 months ago and have lost more than 50% of their savings.

Well, nobody guarantees growth, especially short term.

But 50% loss after a 1000% growth is still better for many people experiencing hyperinflation. Bolivar lost more than 90% of its value in the last 6 months [1].

And hey, if you prefer dollars or euros, all the power to you, use them. But I won't, cause I know it's designed to lose value.

[1]: https://i2.wp.com/cdn.investinblockchain.com/wp-content/uplo...


>Well, nobody guarantees growth, especially short term.

But you're focused on long term remember? Long term, the government is the closest anyone can come to guaranteeing growth. If the government can't grow the economy long term, way more is going wrong than just currency, soon enough it won't matter if your money is in beanie babies or BTC, there's going to be a lot of gnashing of teeth.

>But 50% loss after a 1000% growth is still better for many people experiencing hyperinflation. Bolivar lost more than 90% of its value in the last 6 months [1].

Perfect example, who cares if you have all the BTC in the world if you're in a country where there's not even food to buy? So you figured it out and hoarded BTC, did the shopkeeper? Let's even say they did, well did the power company take BTC? Did the power company's stakeholders and employees take BTC? Did those people's bill collectors take BTC?

Because if not, you don't have food, and that's that.

Long term growth of the economy is literally one of the things countries are built on, if it doesn't happen and hyperinflation takes a hold and the currency is down 90% in 6 months, having 10 years of BTC saved up is going to do much.

The people who were rich enough to have a sizable horde of Bolivar could easily transfer it out of the country at the start of hyperinflation, everyone else is SOL. Same with BTC, if you have enough to leave you leave, if you didn't have enough to leave maybe you're even worse off when the power goes out and the mobile networks start flaking and you don't even have loose leaf which could maybe be traded in one day for a valuable currency.

Inflationary currency is designed to "lose value" as the entire country "gains value", hard to call it "losing money" at that point.


That's a bunch of really strange claims.

> If the government can't grow the economy long term

Governments generally decide policies, and it's private businesses that actually grow the economy. Unless you're talking about socialism, your statement doesn't make sense.

> if you're in a country where there's not even food to buy?

The only country I'm aware with real food shortages at the moment is Venezuela, and the situation is entirely created by the socialist idiots in charge. Thankfully most countries are not going that route.

> and hoarded BTC, did the shopkeeper?

Well, they still can. Nobody is stopping them. Cryptocurrencies are just starting, in my opinion.

> having 10 years of BTC saved up is going to do much

It will do much. They would have more money saved. Which they can use to get out of a shitty country, for example.

> if you didn't have enough to leave maybe you're even worse off when the power goes out and the mobile networks start flaking and you don't even have loose leaf

Maybe. But then your credit/debit cards or ATMs won't work either. Are you advocating holding your money in paper dollars with that argument?

Some cryptocurrencies work over SMS, which doesn't require a data network.

> Inflationary currency is designed to "lose value" as the entire country "gains value", hard to call it "losing money" at that point.

That statement doesn't make any sense. If you made $100, and saved it 100 years ago, it's worth only $3 now. You would be losing money by not investing it. And not necessarily in cryptocurrencies, you can invest into ETF or mutual funds or stocks - almost anything is better than a traditional currency.


I’m usually the one getting annoyed when people play the fallacy card but... this is one contextomy after another.

I’ve addressed every single point you made, you just seem to have intentionally skipped those sentences:

- Taking half the paragraph where I say there’s no power and saying the shopkeeper should horde BTC...

-Saying they should horde BTC to leave when I literally said the same thing and pointed out how if you’re rich enough to leave BTC or Bolivar doesn’t matter, since you’ll have to leave early in the inflation curve to avoid turmoil.

-Saying the sentence about inflation doesn’t make sense then literally explaining exactly what it means like the entire freaking comment before it isn’t literally about investing in the enconomy vs investing in crpyto

I could go on, but I don’t want to waste any more of my time. Good luck with your Monopoly money.


Ha. Good luck with your guaranteed-to-lose-value money.

And no, you didn't address anything. You just got angry for some reason when I showed the flaws in your arguments.


Imagine having this poor an understanding of money, sad.


* Bitcoin is not yet deflationary as new coins are still minted for reward blocks.

* Bitcoin is not guaranteed to go up and has so much volatility that you are essentially gambling.

* Bitcoin is inferior as a payment system, even when they use debit cards to interface with mainstream PoS.

* Bitcoin has probably topped out and we are nearing the end of it's hype cycle.


I didn't even mention Bitcoin. You're fighting a straw man.


As opposed to the silly 75% decrease in Bitcoin from December 2017. So deflationary.


You're confusing value fluctuations with monetary deflation.


I personally have not been able to use a credit card on coinbase for a while now

seemingly this is a US thing [1]

[1]https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/topics/79653...


Sure if they are available in your country, in my case they are not, so I don't have any experience with those.


Security-wise they haven't been really tested yet, but Ethereum moving to a PoS model will be a good case.

The only reason they are accepted at the moment is that it's free money, especially for the initial coin holders(founders/friend investors etc.).

For some reason people now accept fully pre-distributed coins. At least Ethereum went through a PoW phase to allow for some non-ICO distribution.


Yet, the way Web 3.0 works in practice is with a browser extension (which Reborn basically integrated) that does http API calls to a centralized 3rd-party server.

So while they market decentralization and trustlessness, they are one server-compromise away from getting fed a completely false view of Ethereum's blockchain state and losing all their funds.

If that's an attempt on web 3.0, we might as well just skip straight to web 4.0.


You can use this with your own node without trusting any 3rd party server. Right now this takes some effort but projects like Ethereum 2.0 will enable running a self hosted trusted node on low power devices and even mobile phones via checkpoints. It's not a good idea to use today's capabilities to judge future use cases.


If we started posting about each separate case of misused newsletter subscriptions, that'd would be all we would see :P


[ Probably bad calcs below: ]

From the article 2018 saw an increase of 300 million tonnes of oil equivalent of primary global energy demand.

Which is[1] equal to 3489 TWh.

Taking the worst case from one of the most inaccurate reports about bitcoin's estimated power consumption (which is also the highest estimate I've found) is 61.4 TWh annually.

So the total power consumption of bitcoin seems to be the ~1.7% of 2018's total increase on the global power demand.

Take it with a grain of salt, I most probably I have something wrong.

[1]: https://www.unitjuggler.com/convert-energy-from-toe-to-MWh.h...


I doubt that's a viable business model for Discord. It feels like something to go after in order to reassure reactions like the one you were replying to. (Plus any money never hurt anyone, but it doesn't seem viable at all).


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